[HN Gopher] The tyranny of the supertweeter
___________________________________________________________________
The tyranny of the supertweeter
Author : bedbot
Score : 197 points
Date : 2022-09-19 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (omnibudsman.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (omnibudsman.substack.com)
| tlholaday wrote:
| Is this tool feasible?
|
| Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow`
| user @A.
|
| Ideally:
|
| > twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A
|
| Edit: API Review Time!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Oh absolutely and it's not that hard. But that's an overly
| crude filter, because following is a one-way operation on
| Twitter so you might well follow people you actively dislike in
| order to keep tabs on what they're saying. Twitter Lists allow
| for much finer segmentation but because users get a
| notification about this many of them block people who add them
| to lists, and the List infrastructure is kinda mediocre.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Well, there's a similar action:
|
| https://megablock.xyz/
|
| > Don't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and
| every single person who liked it--in one click.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I would like something a bit more fine grained. Have you
| retweeted positive things about x, y, or z or negative things
| about a, b, or c? Then I want your tweet marked with "do not
| engage" because there will be no point in trying to engage with
| them
| brezelgoring wrote:
| The idea is nice and technically possible using the Twitter API
| but the system will clock you and ban you instantly if you try
| blocking 100 people at once.
|
| I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and
| it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system
| wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Twitter should queue the blocks internally and apply them at
| a rate they can handle.
|
| Pretty crappy to limit people's ability to curate.
|
| Go one step further and support block groups, so if NFT's
| become interesting you can enable them.
| CharlesW wrote:
| The Chrome "Twitter Block Chain" extension does this, with the
| bonus of not blocking users you're following:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-block-chai...
| jraedisch wrote:
| "On Twitter, you don't see people; you see tweets."
|
| Very well put.
| readingnews wrote:
| I swear, I was thinking:
| https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/super-tweeters/
| Bakary wrote:
| The part about journalism is particularly troubling because
| Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big
| part in decreasing the credibility of the profession.
|
| The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The
| ability to exist as an individual and have an audience
| independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the
| article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little
| effort.
|
| Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of
| stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads
| repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.
|
| It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who
| don't touch grass. The significance of Twitter users' opinions is
| blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily
| accessible and attractive to journalists.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I agree that this is true but don't just blame Twitter. Look at
| the major "news" networks. Look at the poor quality of
| "reporting". The bigger cause is the _engagement above all
| else_ mentality of generating advertising. Click-bait, faux
| outrage, sensationalism, half-truths, posting 5 year old images
| out of context as "just in", creating scary fake crises, etc.
| ProAm wrote:
| I agree but how do you suggest they make money?
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| The sci-fi seried Buck Godot proposed an entertaining
| solution - allow only a limited number of journalists to
| exist, and let the aspiring journalists sort it out between
| themselves.
|
| The one living journalist in that story was completely
| amoral, but boy was she willing to go to great lengths to
| get the story!
| snarf21 wrote:
| That is a fair question to ask. One big issue is that the
| Fairness Doctrine was repealed long ago. TV news used to
| make quite a lot of money actually reporting the news.
| While times have changed, they have taken the easy road
| down the TMZ path. I think people would be even more
| interested in _actual_ news instead of the "who can shout
| the loudest" nonsense we have now.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The Bloomberg/Reuters model seems to work well: charge
| hedge funds $xx thousand per person per year for super-fast
| up-to-date news, and use that to fund reporting for a
| $10-50/month subscription service that also has a limited
| free tier (a few articles/month with ads).
| labrador wrote:
| > Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't
| touch grass
|
| I wasn't sure what you meant by that. Now I'm really confused:
|
| https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Projection
| cinntaile wrote:
| > The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out
| of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible
| and attractive to journalists.
|
| This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors
| a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame
| made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit
| problematic because that should be based on the merit of the
| research. The same issues could arise for other experts or
| famous people, where as you say their opinions are
| disproportionately echoed due to their presence and activity on
| Twitter.
| DonnyV wrote:
| Disagree The amount of events posted on twitter that aren't
| covered by traditional news is staggering. If anything twitter
| has exposed how much main stream news doesn't cover real major
| events. If not for twitter I don't think the #MeToo or #Occupy
| movement would of ever been acknowledged. Also the amount of
| abuse the police do to citizens.
| nradov wrote:
| Substack is trying to provide an intermediate channel where
| journalists can develop an audience independently of
| publications, but allowing for long-form content. It will be
| interesting to see if that works but I suspect only a small
| number of journalists can be successful in that model.
| bombcar wrote:
| It also introduces even more weakness to certain types of
| influence. The NYTimes has some defense against people not
| liking an article because while people can cancel a
| subscription it's not directly tied to the editor-
| author/journalist.
|
| But substack is directly tied - so unless people really trust
| the author and refuse to cancel if they write something they
| don't like you'll be more inclined to avoid going outside the
| margins.
| Bakary wrote:
| I think the causality is reversed here. Financial success
| on substack will come from developing a particular style
| that doesn't exist elsewhere in quite the same way, just
| like a writer or musician. It's not that people will walk
| on eggshells as they build a bigger audience, but rather
| that they have to start flanderizing themselves from the
| start to get that audience in a crowded market.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, what I was getting at is that you end up with a
| very defined market and you can't easily switch out of
| it. A substack started around "public transit is pretty
| cool/good" will eventually be unable to have any article
| that implies cars have value, to pick and arguably bad
| example.
|
| It's an interesting personal question to ponder - who of
| those I read would I read if they wrote something
| diametrically opposed to what I hold? The lists are often
| pretty short, sadly.
| SamBam wrote:
| There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to
| game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's
| effect on journalists. [1]
|
| He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every
| journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from
| measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get.
| It's so buit into our minds, we can't _not_ use Likes as a
| proxy for how engaging our story is.
|
| The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you
| write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain
| factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if
| you are a New York Times journalist and you write an
| environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people
| who _already_ understand the dangers of climate change, you 'll
| get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful
| because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a
| story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds,
| you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very
| angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be
| less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.
|
| Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo
| chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by
| counting likes.
|
| 1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-
| games-...
| xhevahir wrote:
| > If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might
| change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number
| of likes...
|
| Or, more painfully, you'll see a lot of derisive quote-
| tweets, subtweets, hostile screencaps, the dreaded "ratio"...
| Twitter users are a catty bunch.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The NYT also engages in the opposite of like-based reporting:
| contrarian articles that target engagement via outrage.
|
| The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring
| motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic
| article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016
| onwards)
| bachmeier wrote:
| This is less of a problem to me than the other side effect of
| like-driven journalism. If you only preach to the choir, you
| can get away with misleading or inaccurate claims. Like-
| driven journalism encourages a style where you present only
| some of the facts or even just make stuff up. Folks like
| stuff because of what it says. They don't care if it's
| partial truths or lies. Like-driven journalism quite
| literally punishes honesty.
| imbnwa wrote:
| So basically, how often is one presented with aporias on
| Twitter?
| kixiQu wrote:
| This is also talked about in Nguyen's work, as the
| difference between "epistemic bubble" and "echo chamber".
| It's worth checking out
|
| https://academic.oup.com/book/39388/chapter/339074130
| tenpies wrote:
| The best part is the reward of lying for "journalists".
|
| If you lie and get caught, ignore it.
|
| If the person who called you out has too much of a
| following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at
| the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just
| interpreted things different.
|
| They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who
| makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find
| one? Well a Twitter account is free to make. Boom, the
| story is now how your critic is inciting violence, sexist,
| racist, probably voted for Trump, and insurrectionist, a
| climate change denier, white supremacist, transphobe, etc.
| That's the story now and you're the victim at the center of
| it all.
|
| And the people employing these "journalists" don't just
| shield them from consequence, they reward them for it.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| Don't forget that if there are many different people
| calling you out for telling lies, it's obviously targeted
| harassment.
| Mattasher wrote:
| This gets to the heart of the problem and is even
| understated. If your audience is partisan, going against
| what they want to hear by providing nuance, context, or
| even straight news, can provoke extreme outrage. Perhaps
| people will recall when the NYT had to change a factually
| correct headline because it wasn't sufficiently critical of
| the previous president.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And good luck fitting nuance and context into ~~140~~ 280
| characters !
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| compression and curation are the parents of persuasion
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That's a very good point - I feel very uncomfortable on
| Twitter even today, but I can see how a "words first"
| education would make it easier to cope with.
|
| It doesn't remove the issue though, since the space is
| _so_ limited - IMHO Twitter is instead a much more
| fitting space for poets...
| pphysch wrote:
| Joseph Pulitzer, the prize's namesake, was simultaneously a
| media mogul and U.S. congressman. His name is often
| associated with the dawn of "yellow journalism" and USA
| imperial war propaganda.
|
| Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the
| foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not
| start with Twitter or the internet.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| Basically all of history was powerful people lying to
| everyone and mass media helping them do it.
|
| For some reason people think the world is different today.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Absolutely: Hearst's "You furnish the pictures. I'll
| furnish the war" predates social media by quite a bit
| greggman3 wrote:
| I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've
| tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-
| origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of
| elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even
| a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to
| seek out more of that.
|
| I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their
| a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer
| scores.
|
| I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like
| button is large percentage of the cause of all the various
| problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram,
| TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go
| along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking
| behavior of all the various social medias
| gonzo41 wrote:
| This is a good take on twitters effect on journalism. I was
| just thinking the other day about why journalists don't
| separate their work account and private accounts. I grew up in
| a time where you generally tried to keep your real identity to
| a minimum on platforms. Yet journalists seem to suffer from an
| identity fusion with their professional work, their personal
| views, and their ego all coming together under a single persona
| on twitter. I won't name any person in particular but there are
| some big names out there who are just off the rails crazy these
| days.
| marban wrote:
| Well, you gotta build your brand and launch a paid newsletter
| the minute you got laid off.
| tsol wrote:
| I was thinking about going into journalism for a time and an
| ex- broadcaster teacher of mine connected me with a
| journalist to talk to. One of the biggest things, he said,
| about being a journalist nowadays is you need to build your
| own brand. Most journalists nowadays don't get hired as staff
| writers, they mostly work freelance. So in order to stay
| relevant and keep getting work, they need to develop a SM
| presence and get likes, clicks, etc. That part was what
| really turned me off from journalism as any sort of career.
| gnz11 wrote:
| Not really all that different from the software industry.
| treis wrote:
| I'd say it's pretty different. I don't have any social
| media brand to speak of and AFAIK neither do my co-
| workers.
| crmd wrote:
| >finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the
| right combination of search terms.
|
| This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in
| seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative
| they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions
| by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".
| ajross wrote:
| > This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in
| seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative
| they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions
| by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".
|
| That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major
| organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up
| (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories
| carefully, and make note of how the sources are identified.
| I'd be beyond shocked if "twitter" appeared even once.
|
| IMHO the real reason for "collapse in confidence in
| journalism" is that this is itself a meme driven by people
| who, for partisan reasons, simply don't want to have
| confidence in media reporting things "their side" doesn't
| want to be true. In a world where truth (about climate
| change, election results, disease impact, etc...) is a
| partisan thing, those whose job it is to report the truth
| become part of the war.
|
| But reporters today are doing the same thing reporters have
| always been doing.
|
| [1] Except the occasional circumstance where someone specific
| says something notable and it happens to be on twitter. Trump
| said lots of weird stuff and it got reported, but it's not
| like someone went around filtering his otherwise-not-notable
| tweets for juicy stuff. "He Just Tweeted it Out" is a meme
| for a reason.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| What would you consider a major organization? I'll happily
| grant that the New York Times won't let you do that, but
| it's common for your Voxes
| (https://www.vox.com/culture/23357114/the-little-mermaid-
| raci...) or Rolling Stones
| (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/black-
| litt...) to write articles on the topic of "I found some
| people saying mean things on social media".
| ajross wrote:
| So frustrating. I talked about news and reporters, and
| you try to counter with links to two opinion pieces from
| their journal's respective "culture" sections.
|
| Your point seems to be, what, that people who disagree
| with you are posting on the internet? Should we make the
| same criticism of Substack too?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't understand the distinction you're attempting to
| draw here. I looked at the Vox article in particular in
| detail, and it doesn't seem to have any kind of
| disclaimer that it's in a special section or that
| editorial standards have been lowered.
|
| Am I just supposed to know that the string "/culture/" in
| the URL means it isn't real news and I shouldn't trust
| it? Even as a big proponent of media literacy, that seems
| unreasonable. News organizations must be aware that
| people will believe them when they publish things.
| ajross wrote:
| Oh, come on! The title of that article is, verbatim: "The
| racist backlash to The Little Mermaid and Lord of The
| Rings is exhausting and extremely predictable"
|
| Are you seriously arguing in good faith that you were
| fooled into thinking that this was a piece of objective
| journalism?
|
| You are providing a perfect example of my point, which
| I'll endure the downvotes to point out: rather than see
| an opnion article with which you disagree and just accept
| is as an inevitable result of large populations of people
| living together, you feel the need to explain the
| disagreement as some kind of existential flaw with the
| whole field of journalism. Then you feel justified in
| extending that "mistrust" engendered from Vox authors
| writing articles you don't like to pieces of real
| journalism providing real facts with which you also
| disagree.
|
| And so the whole field of journalism is sullied in your
| mind, simply because (in this case) you don't like the
| fact that some people think black mermaids and elves are
| kinda OK and want to defend their casting against those
| who don't.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm arguing that I literally do not understand the
| distinction you're drawing. In my mind, "news",
| "reporting", and "journalism" encompass all articles
| written by news organizations about current events. I
| wasn't fooled into thinking this was a piece of objective
| journalism, but I did think it's a piece of _non_
| -objective journalism, albeit one where I ultimately
| agree with the author's thesis.
|
| But you seem to be saying it's not journalism at all. So
| what I'm trying to understand is:
|
| * What is the shape of this "not journalism at all"
| category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-
| objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't
| personally think is important?
|
| * Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers
| that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards
| and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their
| journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
|
| * Does the average media-literate person know any of
| this?
|
| Right now I can't answer any of these questions, which
| makes the entire edifice seem more like a trick than a
| real distinction. It's not obvious to me why a news
| organization would want to publish bad articles which
| don't live up to their journalistic standards in the
| first place.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I'm pretty sure many of those major publications ran a
| story or two about the "Ghost of Kiev" which was later
| shown to be a piece of Ukranian disinformation that was
| disseminated through Twitter.
|
| On a more serious note, Twitter has been a very valuable
| source of info about the Ukraine War in general, which
| also makes it ripe for psyops from the Russian and
| Ukrainian governments. Several people on Twitter are very
| reliable sources, much moreso than the official state
| sources, and they get the news out faster. It makes sense
| for those sources to be used by journalists.
| hidudeurcool wrote:
| vorpalhex wrote:
| NYTimes, front pages, sources from Twitter:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/media/russia-
| war...
| ajross wrote:
| Uh, no? Here's the only spot in that story where the word
| "Twitter" (I looked for "tweet" too) is used:
|
| > _Throughout the summer, the Network Contagion Research
| Institute noticed a spike in extremist activity related
| to the Dutch protests on Twitter, Telegram and 4chan, the
| message board on which conspiracy theories spread largely
| unchecked_
|
| The source for that statement is quite clearly NCRI. It's
| reporting news _about_ twitter. It 's not looking to
| twitter for news.
|
| And frankly your attempt to blur the distinction is
| exactly the kind of memery that I was takling about. The
| NYT is your enemy, so you feel justified in spinning
| arguments to "attack" them.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| NYTimes is one of those publications, like the Atlantic,
| that used to have quality writing but now chases
| clickbait... In a rush to the bottom to catch up with
| Gawker, Huffington Post, ...
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| Some of the only reasonable journalism I've read in the
| past year has been from The Atlantic. I have a large
| group chat with friends all over the political spectrum
| and we all can engage with and appreciate it every time
| someone posts an article from there. In fact The Atlantic
| gets more links for us than just about any other
| publication. Really, what downfall are you on about?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| For starters how about this one. I'm sure the twitter
| blue checks all loved it!
|
| "Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice"
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-
| georg...
| naravara wrote:
| The Atlantic's political desk is a little bit crap, but a
| lot of the politically adjacent stuff like arts and
| culture or city planning are fantastic.
| analog31 wrote:
| >finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the
| right combination of search terms.
|
| I'm struck by the parallel to typing the right prompt into
| GPT-3.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've read articles where I'm not convinced GPT-3 was _not_
| the author
|
| It also sounds like a Wikipedia editor's job
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| For many articles, the one dead giveaway that it was
| written by a human is the fact that almost all news
| articles have typos and severe grammar errors in the
| first hour or so of release.
|
| If these Twitter journos had better spelling and grammar,
| they would likely be indistinguishable from GPT-3 output.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so to improve GPT-3, have it make spelling/grammar
| mistakes too?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| It's poison for the career of traditional media also.
|
| News consumers no longer need the journalist middle man, they
| can go directly to the source of the news.
|
| Journalists should now, more than ever, be focused on
| traditional journalistic efforts. Succumbing to the
| temptation to just "find a story on Twitter" is just
| cementing the fact traditional media is dead and the era of
| the citizen journalist is here.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's really obvious when you follow through some of the
| "people are saying" links - it's one thing to report on what
| Musk said, with fifty billion likes and replies already, and
| another to back up a statement with a link to a tweet with
| four likes.
|
| Some are obviously "go out and find what you want someone to
| be saying".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A few years ago there was a mild dust-up when a pre-written
| "response" piece to a pop musician's latest release was
| leaked (possibly early). It included a bunch of pre-written
| filler and included several slots for Twitter responses to
| be filled in prior to actual publication.
|
| This is a very poorly-kept secret in journalism, with
| certain genres (entertainment, politics, business press-
| releases, fashion industry) being especially prone. See
| pg's "Submarine" essay. The practice isn't entirely bad or
| unethical --- obituaries in particular are frequently
| written in advance with details filled in on publication.
| For particularly notable names, they're updated regularly.
| Similarly election outcomes and major technological events
| (e.g., space mission launches / milestones). It's much
| easier to have something prepared than to start from
| scratch as the event occurs, and these in particular have
| predictable deadlines.
|
| From the 1980s through the aughts, the term "fake news"
| applied to VNR and ANR (video and audio newsreels), which
| were pre-packaged "news" segments for television and radio
| prepared by corporations and/or PR firms. See:
| <https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fake_news>
|
| But in other cases, especially where something's being
| sold, it's at the very least deceptive.
| busterarm wrote:
| "sources" are taken at face value as well and aren't reported
| critically at all.
|
| If your personal narrative drives clicks it will not be
| challenged in any way...whether you're a random poster on
| twitter or a participant in the story itself.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That being said, they always had this power. It just used to
| be selectively chosen on the ground interviews with random
| people. It was slower and much more expensive, but it was
| there.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or service workers whom they'd be most likely to meet: taxi
| drivers, barkeepers, restaurant servers, hotel concierges,
| shoe-shiners, etc. Accessible, yes, and possibly with a
| fair exposure to at least a range of views/responses from
| others. But not entirely representative.
| naravara wrote:
| Journalists are less likely to do this than various activist
| groups. Spend 5 minutes on any politically extreme subreddit
| or forum and you'll see tons of posts that are just
| compilations of insane tweets from random accounts, some blue
| checks and some not. Tons of online activity just involved
| "nut-picking" for unhinged people on Twitter who say crazy or
| provocative stuff to create a narrative that this type of
| sentiment is everywhere.
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| True, but those extremist subreddits or forums are expected
| to include those views. Journalists are expected to include
| at least somewhat more objective points of view, but they
| often don't.
| notriddle wrote:
| Of course, but there's a difference between a Bud Light ad
| glorifying beer, and E-B secretly funneling money towards
| academic studies that show positive impacts from moderate
| consumption of alcohol. Some groups aren't really expected
| to be impartial.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| Real questions here, I'm not a Twitter user:
|
| are blue check marks ever re evaluated or audited, and not just
| for authenticity of the person being who they claim but for the
| general validity of what they say or report?
|
| Are there other badges similar to the blue check for other
| things? My understanding is that the blue check is for
| verifying people are who they claim, is there another badge to
| signify "hey this person posts legit things with references as
| a reporter"?
| samatman wrote:
| This is an insult to the Mercator projection, which exists to
| provide an objective map of longitude to up and down.
|
| The social graph of Twitter journalism is an ephemeron, it
| means only itself and maps to no other part of reality. This
| distorts in every direction it can, while giving no useful
| reference frame in return.
| Bakary wrote:
| On the contrary, it is a reverent homage. What other map is
| so significant in modern-day culture that it has gained any
| reputation at all, let alone a cadre of haters? Thanks to it,
| discussing map projections will never not be funny.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > Mercator projection, which exists to provide an objective
| map of longitude to up and down.
|
| While true, it also distorts reality and leads to mistaken
| ideas about the world:
|
| https://wonderfulengineering.com/the-authagraph-world-map-
| is...
| bnralt wrote:
| _Every_ map projection distorts reality in some way.
| There's simply no way to accurately portray a sphere as a
| two dimensional object without some trade-offs. The
| Mercator projection has some useful trade offs, which is
| why Google maps used it for so long (and still does as
| certain scales, I believe).
|
| I don't believe the authagraph projection is even the best
| map projection for preserving things like shape and area
| (other projections such as the Cahill-Keyes projection or
| Dymaxion projection seem better for both).
|
| But of course, if you want the least amount of distortion,
| just get a globe.
| Bakary wrote:
| The Mercator is like circumcision. There might be many
| reasons invoked for it, but the main reason is that it's
| just what people in the US are familiar with. Even with
| no real trade-offs it's fairly clear that Google would
| still have picked it.
| bnralt wrote:
| Apparently Mercator wasn't the original projection they
| used[1]. But they found that it worked better for giving
| people directions because it preserved route angles in
| higher latitude regions (it's benefit for navigation is
| the reason it became so popular, from my understanding).
|
| For what it's worth, I feel like I don't actually come
| across the Mercator projection that often (I'd say the
| Robinson projection is more popular in schools, for
| instance).
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/5/17653122/google-
| maps-updat...
| Bakary wrote:
| I stand corrected!
| samatman wrote:
| If you cut meat with an ax, this is a mistake, but it isn't
| the ax which is mistaken.
| tux1968 wrote:
| If everyone in society is still cutting meat with an axe,
| it's a mistake to not mention better alternatives ;-)
| polytely wrote:
| It is very convenient if you want to run influence operations,
| to change the perception of reality for news consumers you only
| have to influence a handful of journalists by planting some
| tweets on their timeline.
| busterarm wrote:
| Interesting how you see people "leaving" careers in the CIA
| and NSA for posts in news organizations.
| flerchin wrote:
| How would one "see" that?
| j-bos wrote:
| And in theory, praising them with a disproportionate
| (compared to their own average's) number of likes and
| retweets when they tweet something to you(r organization's)
| advantage.
| jqgatsby wrote:
| "It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people
| who don't touch grass."
|
| Well said!
|
| Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article
| comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's
| the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism
| rates are much higher than they are:
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-p...
| greggman3 wrote:
| I'm curious what you see as wrong there?
|
| The original study said that 50-55% made it back into prison.
| The new study says it's more like 33% that make it back into
| prison. Yes, 1 of 3 is better than 1 of 2 but it's still 1 of
| 3. I'd call that high personally. In what other circumstance
| would I take a risk of something bad happening if the bad
| outcome happpened 1 out of 3 times?
| vintermann wrote:
| This blog does not inspire confidence when it cites studies which
| classify people from "extreme liberal" to "extreme conservative".
| Much of the US left has rejected the term liberal for decades
| (check out Phil Ochs' classic "Love me, I'm a liberal"). You
| throw away way too much information when you just use people's
| self identification on a scale like that.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech/hacker people
| and routinely mute/block those who think I want to hear their
| inane/naive political opinions.
|
| And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice
| tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.
| colpabar wrote:
| What do you do about the recommendations? I am _constantly_
| bombarded with suggestions for topics that I have 0 interest
| in. I click not interested, I update my settings, I create
| custom ublock rules, and yet they always come back eventually.
| asicsp wrote:
| Use lists.
| jacooper wrote:
| stop using the home page, and switch to the normal timeline
| from the star icon.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I've mentally tuned them out! Also, twitter seems to have
| made recommendations more in-line with my filter bubble so
| even when I notice them, they're often relevant.
|
| Trending for me now is "retrogaming."
| tom_ wrote:
| I ignore them.
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| Same, and with Reddit too (for me).
| jacooper wrote:
| Reddit politics is on a whole new level of extremism.
| tomcam wrote:
| I literally don't see it and don't care. I'm there for the
| chicken videos and Hold My Cosmo.
|
| Not proud of the Hold My Cosmo thing...
| Vaslo wrote:
| Agree here. For example I used to follow Scott Hanselman of
| Microsoft on there as he has some interesting tech material but
| it was constantly blended in with his far left views so I quit.
| I follow tech folks for the interesting tech opinions they
| have. Their expertise or thoughts on politics are about as
| important to me as my 10 year old neighbor's.
| idatum wrote:
| I went a step further and unfollowed all individuals. I read
| Twitter about 1 or 2 times a week, in a browser. It starts to
| feel like what RSS was. It's reasonably useful to keep up on
| things this way. And I do "go play outside" enough.
|
| I'm currently following 50 accounts. No journalists (i.e., no
| news accounts). I get enough new things to think about and
| gadgets to consider. Quick examples:
|
| When there's an outage, Cloudflare Radar can be useful. When
| there's a traffic event, my US state's DOT can be useful. When
| there's a new release of OpenBSD: @OpenBSD.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Super tweeters are very likely narcissist, possibly psychopaths,
| if they are not actually a front/shill/bot. Think about the
| people in real life who always have to be the center of
| attention. Rarely you will find someone with a virtuous mission,
| who recognizes the power of a group. Most often you just find an
| emotionally damaged person who is trying to fill a hole.
|
| Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on
| once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless
| supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the
| most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they
| certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.
| rconti wrote:
| Often the super-Tweeters will be people who literally have
| nothing better to do (eg, their time is worth very little), or
| who are _being paid to do so_ one way or another, and all of
| the things that implies.
|
| Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on
| the internet :)
| [deleted]
| isaacfrond wrote:
| I've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of
| statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither
| tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this
| the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will
| read it?
|
| I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then
| proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it _is_ like real
| life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then
| concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life
| after all.
|
| I'm left a bit confused.
| yew wrote:
| The entire article is an extended definition of the headline
| term mixed with discussion of the implications of presentation
| bias. It's also quite concise. To the point that I almost can't
| believe this isn't trolling.
| parasti wrote:
| I also take issue with the headline. "Tyranny" is when you have
| no choice. That is not the case with Twitter. First of all,
| there is the choice of using Twitter. Secondly, there is the
| choice of who to follow on Twitter. I would hazard a guess that
| "tyranny" is not a thing that most Twitter users experience on
| Twitter.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's a common usage, not meant to be taken quite so
| literally. Try something that will autocomplete search for
| you and start with "the tyranny of..." and see what happens.
|
| I get:
|
| - The tyranny of structurelessness
|
| - ... of merit
|
| - ... of tears
|
| - ... of the dark
|
| - ... of metrics
|
| - ... of weakness
|
| and I'm sure they'd just keep going if it could display more
| entries at once. While typing, it brought up an article
| complaining about Millennial design aesthetics containing the
| phrase, "the tyranny of terrazzo".
|
| It's like "goto considered harmful" but with a longer
| history, and way more popular--familiar to a much wider set
| of readers than "... considered harmful", that is.
| ufo wrote:
| I think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents
| people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible
| for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that
| this makes twitter more negative than real life, because
| negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that
| journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very
| important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For example,
| during the black lives matter protest the #DefundThePolice
| hashtag got a lot of circulation on twitter and reverberated
| with mainstream media and politicians. Despite it being a
| relatively fringe slogan, the way it's worded (taken literally,
| it sounds like abolishing the police altogether).
| jimmaswell wrote:
| You could also say your attention span in real life
| overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden
| at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not
| really so different.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Except that it doesn't, at least not on the same scale.
|
| If people start talking all the time in real life people
| will first start ignoring them, and then isolate them.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Protesting on the road takes time and effort.
|
| Tweeting merely requires a toilet break at work.
|
| Once I started viewing all online media as the equivalent
| of the graffiti on toilet stalls the world started making
| sense again.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| The article section "The Point"[0] seems to have your answer.
|
| It is a giant echo chamber of very few, where the media buys in
| to the echo as "everyone" and reverberate outside of the
| chamber as the truth.
|
| [0] https://omnibudsman.substack.com/i/73890656/the-point
| Tycho wrote:
| I remember @pmarca kept a Twitter list of journalist accounts. It
| was a pretty good thing to browse, full of stories that
| journalists were trying to bring to light. Then in 2016 it became
| unreadable, just a 24/7 TDS group therapy forum.
| dexwiz wrote:
| TDS?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I've said this before, and I've said this a lot. If you want
| discourse to be more representative of what people generally
| think instead of reinforcing and normalizing the most ideological
| and extreme opinions, platforms should curtail or rate limit
| user's public posts/comments.
|
| If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might
| come under the impression that lots of people feel some
| particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters
| dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go
| away is to have post limits of some kind.
|
| Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day,
| which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly
| important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine!
| etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or
| limit trolls to less speech on your platform.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Here is an example of how insane twitter is:
| https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1571629917372039168
|
| This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of
| people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000
| likes, meaning it has influenced _at least_ that many people.
|
| The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This
| person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream
| American political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is
| so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that
| it's actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the
| person making this claim isn't either literally experiencing
| mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking
| the psyche of the people reading what he writes.
|
| And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing
| this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it
| massively amplified. Terrifying.
| teachrdan wrote:
| > This person is perpetuating the idea that there are
| mainstream American political candidates who are aligned with
| Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in
| reality that it's actually difficult for me to imagine a
| scenario where the person making this claim isn't either
| literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations,
| or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what
| he writes.
|
| There are a handful of prominent Republican candidates who make
| public appearances with white supremacists.
|
| "GOP lawmakers will appear alongside white nationalists, Nazi
| apologists, at rally to support insurrectionists"
|
| https://www.azmirror.com/2021/09/23/gop-officials-will-appea...
|
| "GOP grapples with extremist episodes among its own"
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/04/gop-extremism-47380...
|
| "GOP leaders denounce Greene, Gosar for speaking at white
| nationalist event"
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gop-leaders-denoun...
| thepasswordis wrote:
| The Nazis were openly and explicitly engaged in _genocide_.
| They killed millions of people in death camps. They didn 't
| talk about it, they didn't allude to it. They did it.
| MILLIONS of people were killed like cattle. This happened in
| real life.
|
| White nationalists are bad. Racists are bad. The people
| associating themselves with those people shouldn't be.
|
| Being a stupid ignorant racist, and building actual in real
| life death camps and then putting millions of people to death
| in gas chambers are galaxies apart, and the people implying
| that idiots saying stupid things on youtube are equivalent to
| an actual genocide are, in my opinion, engaging in a form of
| holocaust denial.
|
| The death camps were core to the Nazis political ideology.
|
| Is there a single US politician calling for this or anything
| even remotely aligned with it? Your implication that MTG
| appearing on stage with a racist internet troll is somehow
| equivalent to her aligning with people engaging in the
| industrialized murder of millions of people is _absurd_.
| 8note wrote:
| Hitler was a Nazi before the death camps opened. He was a
| nazi before he was chancellor, too.
|
| In retrospect, they're remembered for the death camps, but
| they didn't start with them, and somebody looking to set up
| death camps wouldn't either.
|
| The goal is to not have Nazis in charge who can make death
| camps. If you wait to stop then until the death camps are
| there, you've failed at the goal
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > They didn't talk about it, they didn't allude to it. They
| did it.
|
| Of course they talked about it, they did so for years
| before putting their genocidal aspirations into action.
|
| > Is there a single US politician calling for this or
| anything even remotely aligned with it?
|
| Sure: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-
| state-r...
|
| This guy is popping on stage with Michael Flynn, who is
| doing a national tour combining 'Stop the Steal' election
| theft narratives with New Apostolic Revival theology.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I think this conversation is an example of people living
| in different worlds, and it's the type of thing that has
| been created out of the place that things like what I
| linked above have pushed the discourse.
|
| In my world: the nazis were essentially a psychotic death
| cult who engaged in genocide. They didn't work up to
| this. This was core to their political ideology starting
| in 1920.
|
| But there seems to be another world where the Nazis were
| just some bad guys with some bad ideas or something, and
| in that world random politicians who say anything outside
| of mainstream, American leftwing political ideology are
| "nazis".
|
| Obviously I think that's bad, since like I said before I
| think its a form of holocaust denial. In fact this was
| something that soldiers and journalists worried about
| when they found the nazi death camps at the end of the
| war. They worried that in the future people wouldn't
| believe that this had happened, or wouldn't understand
| _how bad_ it was.
|
| It seems like that has happened. I think that in a large
| part mass media like twitter has facilitated it.
|
| What I would say is: please study history. The nazis
| weren't just some bad guys. They tried to kill several
| entire races of people, and erase their existence from
| history. They succeeding in killing a lot of them before
| we were able to stop them. It cannot be overstated how
| evil the Nazis were, and I wish people would stop trying
| to downplay this.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > random politicians who say anything outside of
| mainstream, American leftwing political ideology are
| "nazis"
|
| > its a form of holocaust denial
|
| This is nonsensical and self-contradictory. People on the
| far right today are compared to Nazis because they are
| articulating the exact same ideas of genocidal
| elimination, sometimes with explicit reference to and
| endorsement of the Nazis. you're invoking 'random
| politicians' as if they were quirky nobodies in
| unimportant political backwaters, but this is
| demonstrably not the case. I can point to members of
| Congress and and successful state level politicians that
| openly endorse far right anti-Semitic propagandists.
|
| > What I would say is: please study history. The nazis
| weren't just some bad guys. They tried to kill several
| entire races of people, and erase their existence from
| history. They succeeding in killing a lot of them before
| we were able to stop them.
|
| It's because I've studied history that I think you are
| (at best) staggeringly naive. The Nazis were clear about
| the intensity of their animus towards Jews and lots of
| other groups, but not explicit about how they were going
| to achieve their goals of eradication (because they
| didn't know). As a result few took them particularly
| seriously at first, and even when they took power foreign
| observers assumed they would set aside their bombastic
| demagoguery in favor of mundane administrative efforts.
| The same sort of unwillingness to contemplate political
| risks obtains now, and it is just as foolish.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I wonder what effect this sort of "debate" in public is
| having on people's ability to talk to each other.
|
| In a normal discussion if you and I were just talking to
| each other and nobody was watching, it would be easy for
| you to just admit that you are wrong. You are wrong about
| your comparisons between center right American
| politicians being similar in any meaningful way to Nazis
| (for instance: both Nazis and American conservatives use
| spoken word to convey their messages. They both held
| political rallies. These are not meaningful
| similarities.), and you are also wrong about your
| understanding of people raising their hands in prayer.
|
| https://churchleaders.com/worship/worship-
| articles/341942-10...
|
| Do a google search for "lifting single hand while praying
| in church" and you will find pages and pages and pages of
| religious people debating the biblical relevance of this.
| There is absolutely _nothing_ meaningfully similar
| between a religious person raising their hand in prayer
| (what was happening in the linked video) and a _Nazi
| salute_.
|
| You were just _simply_ incorrect about this, seemingly
| because you didn 't know about the practice of religious
| people doing this.
|
| In a normal conversation, it would be easy for you to
| just receive this piece of information you didn't have
| previously, integrate it into your understanding about
| the world, and rebuild your arguments around this new
| understanding.
|
| But online, especially with twitter and the like, every
| one of these discussion is effectively happening on a
| stage in front of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of
| people. People (I think you are doing this right now)
| will go _so_ far to avoid being wrong about something,
| that they eventually get to the point of having to build
| and present a world model that is totally rotated around
| the thing they were wrong about. The _entire_ world has
| to change to support this minor inaccuracy in what was
| said.
|
| So for example: instead of acknowledging the fact that
| you were just wrong about how people pray, you are now
| building out this world in which The United States of
| America is _filled_ with thousands of churches full of
| millions of people who for the last several hundred years
| at least have been signaling their alignment with a
| genocidal, national socialist German death cult.
|
| Can you see how that's a problem? Not the way you're
| engaging with this (which I do think is a problem), but
| the fact of making all of every conversation public?
|
| Even suppose we were having this conversation in a
| private message. Even that doesn't matter because either
| of us could just screenshot it, put it on twitter, and
| invite the mob to ridicule the person who was wrong.
|
| Look at the lengths people will go to protect their idea
| of "well actually the _entire_ world is wrong and I 'm
| right".
|
| It's really scary stuff.
|
| I don't think it's necessary to continue talking to you
| about Nazis and how American Christians are or aren't
| signaling an alignment with them. However in the spirit
| of good argument, I think it's also rude to try to take
| the last word and not let somebody reply. Feel free to
| respond to this, but after that I won't be replying to
| you anymore.
|
| Please have a nice day.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > I_am_fine_wojak.jpg
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Disingenuous BS. Since when are political rallies doubling up
| as evangelical revivals, and why? If I wanted to live in a
| theocracy I would move to Iran.
|
| I don't care for this Tristan Snell person, an obvious
| political shill. But your protestations ring hollow. The
| psychological manipulation in this example and a recent Trump
| rally at Youngstown, Ohio (music playing over the speech,
| similar coordinated gestures of religiosity in the audience)
| are screamingly obvious.
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| It's ironic that you're accusing the parent poster of
| "Disingenuous BS", when you yourself are engaging in moving
| the goalposts. The parent post was complaining about how a
| tweet was unfairly describing a political rally as a "nazi
| salute", but you're changing the topic to "political rallies
| doubling up as evangelical revivals" and "psychological
| manipulation". It's fair to be against this political rally
| for those reasons, but it's unfair to accuse them of "nazi
| salute".
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Right, it just looks like a Nazi salute and it serves the
| same psychological purpose, but as long as we call it
| something else it's perfectly OK. I think it would be wiser
| to ask yourself why this is being deployed at political
| rallies, rather than complaining about how it is 'unfair'
| to draw comparisons just because you can identify
| superficial differences.
|
| It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group
| of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute,
| some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of
| the similarity. It seems to me that if you're in a culture
| where people are widely familiar with Nazi iconography, and
| you're not exploring Nazism in some fictional or
| educational context, then you'd want to avoid doing and
| saying things that make you look and sound like a Nazi,
| such as training a crowd of people to do a stiff-arm salute
| at a political rally for theatrical effect, the same way
| it's a bad idea to hold up swastika flags and claim you
| were being 'ironic' or 'trying to provoke a discussion'.
| gruez wrote:
| >Right, it just looks like a Nazi salute
|
| In the sense of what? Raising your right hand? That's
| basically the only part that overlaps. From wikipedia:
|
| >The salute is performed by extending the right arm from
| the shoulder into the air with a straightened hand.
| Usually, the person offering the salute would say "Heil
| Hitler!" (lit. 'Hail Hitler!', IPA: [,haIl 'hItla]
| (listen)),[3] "Heil, mein Fuhrer!" ('Hail, my leader!'),
| or "Sieg Heil!" ('Hail victory!').
|
| Also, in the video a prayer was performed and afterwards
| they slammed their hand while saying "as one", both of
| which are not part of the nazi salute.
|
| >it serves the same psychological purpose
|
| Can you expand on this? What do you mean by
| "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as
| "symbol of support in a political rally"?
|
| >but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly
| OK
|
| I'm certainly not defending the actions that were taken
| by the participants of the rally, and I suspect neither
| is the other poster (thepasswordis). The complaint is
| that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that
| rally by calling something it's not. The problem with
| this is that words have meaning, and if you start using
| in cases that clearly does not fit the original meaning,
| then it gets watered down. eg. "nazi" nowadays is
| synonymous with "white supremacist" (which itself has
| also been watered down), which is far from the original
| meaning of "member of the National Socialist German
| Workers' Party". That's all well and good if you want to
| demonize those groups, but what do you call people who
| actually want to systematically murder jews?
|
| >It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a
| group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi
| salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to
| take note of the similarity.
|
| I'm not against taking note of the similarity. I'm
| against calling it a "nazi salute" with no qualifiers.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > Can you expand on this? What do you mean by
| "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as
| "symbol of support in a political rally"?
|
| It's collective, coordinated, and directs attention
| toward an individual on stage, as opposed to an
| individual expression of support like clapping or
| cheering - which many people might do simultaneously but
| isn't normally coordinated outside of a music
| performance. The 'as one' hand slamming you mentioned
| emphasizes the coordination here; it's novel, but
| basically an iteration on the original gesture.
|
| > The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to
| sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not.
|
| The tweet is somewhat hyperbolic and sensationalized, but
| while it's not _exactly_ the same I really think it 's
| more similar than different - it's a choreographed
| gesture of support for a political figure at a political
| rally involving a straight arm salute. As I said earlier,
| harping on the cosmetic differences sidesteps the very
| obvious question of 'does this look like a nazi rally to
| a casual observer?' And that matters, because political
| rallies aren't intellectually rigorous exercises in
| philosophical inquiry, they are theatrical performances
| designed to motivate political behavior through emotional
| arousal.
|
| > That's all well and good if you want to demonize those
| groups, but what do you call people who actually want to
| systematically murder jews?
|
| Groypers (this is an in-joke). We also have open neo-
| nazis who are explicitly aligned with the historical
| national socialist movement to the point of fetishizing
| it. The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains
| in multiple countries at present can be generally
| described as fascism without any loss of precision or
| clarity. This doesn't have to refer to the-Italian-party-
| once-headed-by-Benito-Mussolini. Obsessing over
| typologies is sometimes a coping mechanism to avoid
| engaging with an issue, like having an argument about
| meteorology to avoid admitting you should have brought an
| umbrella.
| dbfx wrote:
| Even hn has some supertweeters, fascinating.
| gruez wrote:
| >As I said earlier, harping on the cosmetic differences
| sidesteps the very obvious question of 'does this look
| like a nazi rally to a casual observer?'
|
| But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi
| rally"? If you go around saying that a politician just
| held a "nazi rally", what pops in your head? You seem to
| think that the answer to both is something along the
| lines of "collective, coordinated, and directs attention
| toward an individual on stage", but I doubt most people
| believe that. This sort of behavior isn't limited to just
| political rallies for white supremacists, it's used by
| basically everyone. Calling right-wing or even white
| supremacist rallies as "nazi rallies" makes as much sense
| as calling left wing rallies as "Bolshevik rallies".
|
| >The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains in
| multiple countries at present can be generally described
| as fascism without any loss of precision or clarity
|
| You don't see the problem here? You just equated "right
| wing authoritarianism" with "nazis" and "fascism". What
| does "right wing authoritarianism" mean, anyways? Is it
| just people who are more right wing and authoritarian
| than you by some arbitrary amount? If a politician is
| called a "nazi" or a "fascist", his policies could be
| anywhere between "more funding for the police and
| stricter immigration enforcement" and "round up
| minorities and send them to death camps".
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi
| rally"?
|
| A combination of Nazi-style iconography and right
| wing/reactionary rhetoric. I've yet to see a 'left wing
| rally' in the US but I suppose that could take in center-
| left rallies by politicians like Bernie Sanders. And
| people do label such events as a bunch of commies.
|
| I'm not sure what you have in mind with 'Bolshevik
| rallies'. I can't think of anything visually distinctive
| about historical examples, and when I think of Communist
| party events I think of very formal affairs in
| auditoriums as you might see from China or North Korea.
| I'm having trouble imagining an American equivalent.
|
| > You don't see the problem here? You just equated "right
| wing authoritarianism" with "nazis" and "fascism". What
| does "right wing authoritarianism" mean, anyways?
|
| If you're struggling with very common political theory
| terms used in a wholly conventional way, perhaps you
| should consult a dictionary instead of asking me to stand
| in for one. I think you get me just fine.
| npc54321 wrote:
| uwagar wrote:
| used to be a regular twitter user until a few things shocked me
| that a person could tweet thru out the day..eg., many coronavirus
| expert accounts...it seemed like personal accounts but how can
| they tweet thru out the day like serious / data intensive
| tweets...7 days a week....felt these accounts were fronts, maybe
| they had a team of people contributing the tweets.
|
| it really put me off when twitter started inserting suggested
| topics and tweets from people i really didnt follow to just fill
| out my feed. even more offputting was the suggested tweets came
| interspersed in the tweets of those that i follow. does it happen
| to others or is it just me because i only follow a few people <
| 50.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| Twitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general
| makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets.
|
| It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.
|
| Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would
| be best to shut it down and start over.
| coldcode wrote:
| I only look at art tweets and tweet my new work several times a
| week. Other than that I ignore all the crap.
| [deleted]
| andrew_ wrote:
| The prolific "threads" that have supplanted blog posts are one
| of the worst aspects IMHO. The threads get engagement, and
| that's addictive, but it's a horrible way to consume
| information.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.
|
| How about leaving it at shutting down and be done with it.
| metabagel wrote:
| Depends on who you follow. I unfollow and if necessary mute
| people who create drama.
|
| You can also create a list of people who you are consistently
| interested in hearing from.
|
| However, I agree that you're probably better off without
| Twitter. It's a time sink.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| We made a 100% accessible, globally connected town square, and
| this is what we got. Either we accept it or admit that humanity
| can't deal with the kind of interconnected open discourse that
| proponents of direct democracy dreamed of for ages.
|
| I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt
| to it, in the long run probably for the better.
| delecti wrote:
| Which 1-3 tweets though? When I open my Twitter homepage, the
| top 3 tweets are: art, a selfie, and lighthearted nostalgia
| about 90s cartoons.
|
| It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also
| very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can
| look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down
| every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| I often catch up on latest news around several topics, sports
| etc. Twitter is normally faster then news mediums. So every
| now and then I check the trends. Every single trend you click
| turns into a cess pit from tweet nr 2 or 3.
| plonk wrote:
| Don't check the trends. Find a circle of people with your
| interests and stay away from political spam you're not
| interested in. That makes Twitter very useful for e.g.
| following research or getting informed opinions.
| password1 wrote:
| It also thrives in "hot takes" that might sound smart at first
| glance but are incredibly ignorant if you analyse them.
| Everything is oversimplified to fit the character limit, but
| nobody seems to notice. It's ignorant hot-takes in answer to
| other ignorant hot-takes. TikTok is basically the same btw, but
| in video format.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted
| insights with a minimal of background or literature research.
| This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent
| years thinking about.
|
| I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but
| correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding
| ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand
| theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just
| a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not
| exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the
| writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking
| carefully about.
|
| If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really
| great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
| bombcar wrote:
| Like all social media it values speed way more than
| anything else. Even on HN you'll see it. Hundred page
| document gets posted, but the first comments will be from
| people who clearly couldn't have read it.
| h2odragon wrote:
| The PA cartoon, "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" really summed up the
| potential of the service right at the beginning. Twitter
| steamrolled other, better discussion sites with a sub-optimal
| design _because_ it 's impossible to have a real discussion
| there. Look who backed them, look at their early marketing
| efforts: This shit here was the goal all along.
| mistermann wrote:
| It's almost the perfect design for dumbing down topics and
| the population, keeping them fighting among themselves so
| they don't unify and fight the real enemy.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Twitter is one of the worst places I 've ever visited. In
| general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets._
|
| The Twitter experience depends mostly on who you follow and
| how.
|
| The "who" is self-explanatory, and for the "how" I recommend
| solely using Twitter Lists almost exclusively.
| duxup wrote:
| The medium is the message and the medium is really horrible.
|
| Every time I've tried to cultivate a nice list of feeds it has
| been constant hassle to manage it.
| [deleted]
| patchtopic wrote:
| anyone else disappointed this wasn't about high frequency
| audiophile mafia?
| codpiece wrote:
| Me. Here I was hoping to learn more about why I can't reproduce
| those sweet, sweet high notes.
| prions wrote:
| So Twitter isn't important except for:
|
| * influential politicians
|
| * journalists
|
| * Jerome powell "... though there's some evidence that Jay
| Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for
| ideas on monetary policy"
|
| * College educated people (94 million americans)
|
| I don't think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My first take was that a "supertweeter" is the opposite of a
| "subwoofer".
| h2odragon wrote:
| I bet we could sell ultrasonic transducers to audiophiles at a
| fat profit.
|
| "Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio
| improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes,
| drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years.
| Only $495"
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Pish. $49,500 or it's clearly a cheap knockoff.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| A classic on this topic, more general: _Most of Most of What You
| Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People_ [1].
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
| jbuhbjlnjbn wrote:
| There is a different explanation about the 'power posters' -
| not that they are "insane", but that it's their job. They get
| good amounts of money for doing what they do.
|
| As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a
| single person, but multiple people, posting under the same
| name.
| philippejara wrote:
| There's another side to it as well, the people who want it to
| be their job, and just see it as another avenue to deliver
| contest similar to a stream.
| yew wrote:
| Some of them probably are effectively paid advertising teams.
| That doesn't really explain some of the people you used to
| get on forums though. Why pay someone to write 24/7 micro-
| serial "Transformers" fan-fiction?
| the_doctah wrote:
| Transformers is not nearly niche enough to warrant being
| used here
| bombcar wrote:
| Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly
| realizes that the "all the posters I don't like are paid
| shills" argument doesn't hold up well at all. It's often a
| cope - "my side/the good side would obviously be winning if
| it weren't for these paid shills".
|
| There are way too many true believers who are terminally
| online and you can find almost anything out there.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Weird Internet used to be a few places. Now it (more
| precisely, the ideas) is everywhere, and reported on as
| if it is perfectly normal, because "journalism." This
| ends up legitimizing it further, even if it is painted as
| weird, as some ideas benefit from any sort of exposure
| ("the man is oppressing us by painting it as bad!").
|
| Terminally online users are the problem. Until we regard
| their neurosis, addiction, and proclivity for unreality
| as a real problem, this will only get worse. Pulling on
| this string will drag several much harder problems along
| with it, such as equitable access to mental health care.
| yew wrote:
| Eh. It _can_ happen. I know someone who 's paid to
| moderate [1] a "grassroots" brand subreddit. It's just
| that "you're not real" is easier to believe than "you
| genuinely think Donald Trump is the prophesied Jewish
| messiah." Barring conclusive evidence (which rarely [2])
| people gravitate in one direction.
|
| I'd guess it's a mix, with a little straight money, a lot
| of obsession, and a middling amount of compensated cat
| herding.
|
| [1] The playbook being basically "discuss reasonable
| criticism, remove unreasonable criticism" ie "nobody talk
| too much about that battery fire, but don't make it look
| suspicious."
|
| [2] "On the Internet, you know everybody who disagrees
| with you is a dog."
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly
| realizes that the "all the posters I don't like are paid
| shills" argument doesn't hold up well at all. It's often
| a cope - "my side/the good side would obviously be
| winning if it weren't for these paid shills".
|
| > There are way too many true believers who are
| terminally online and you can find almost anything out
| there.
|
| There doesn't have to be a single explanation, though. It
| can be paid shills _and_ obsessives.
| genericone wrote:
| Very ironically/interestingly, this was case for the big
| anti-american posts from mainland China:
|
| Infamously anti-west personality Sima Nan: "Being anti-
| American is work while visiting the U.S. is life"
| https://youtu.be/Q0y84Oi3VW8
|
| Short summary, his wife and child are U.S citizens, and he
| visits them often, but his entire career is made up of
| bashing the west, western values, and putting the ccp on a
| pedestal, and he's made a small fortune on this career...
| until his turn came.
| dang wrote:
| Someone has posted it here, perhaps in response to your
| comment:
|
| _Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane
| people (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812
| - Sept 2022 (36 comments)
|
| - but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly
| because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations
| of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because
| it tends to split the discussion.
|
| (You did the preferable thing by talking about this in the
| original thread.)
| tchock23 wrote:
| Dang - related to OP's post is there a 90/9/1 participation
| dynamic at play on HN?
| dang wrote:
| I haven't read the OP but if you're asking whether 10% of
| users log in and 1% actually post things, that's pretty
| close IIRC.
| refurb wrote:
| I know the article doesn't literally mean "insane" as in mental
| illness, but it reminded me of something that happened long ago
| and its implications for the internet.
|
| My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to
| call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the
| 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess
| what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and
| could listen to all the voicemails left.
|
| Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers.
| Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before
| the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty
| decent cross section of America watches it.
|
| Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained _hundreds_ of voicemails
| and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was
| interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe
| Americas" was that the vast majority were _insane ramblings
| from clearly mentally ill people_. They would call multiple
| times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We
| 're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced
| psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left _every day,
| every week, for years and years_.
|
| And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were.
| Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and
| "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were
| maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched
| the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to
| do and it's not like they actually care."
|
| It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they
| called because _someone listened_. It was an outlet. And for
| those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.
|
| It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How
| much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same
| people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that
| voicemail service decades ago?
|
| I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't
| mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but
| "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
|
| So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots,
| my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet
| is _people believing what they read represents the actual views
| of average citizens_. It 's not.
|
| Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is.
| And if they go online they probably read and upvote something
| and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane
| ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable
| mental illness of some sort.
|
| That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those
| mentally ill folks... right?
| peteradio wrote:
| Bulk? That seems hard to believe, is that outside of HN or
| are you including your own large paragraph here as part of
| the denominator?
| Bakary wrote:
| You don't even need serious mental illness. Just the desire
| to have someone listen because you are discontent but
| otherwise sane.
| bombcar wrote:
| As people's "real world" connections dwindle the desire to
| just talk continues - I've known people who are perfectly
| content with their crazy idea if they can talk about it now
| and then, but if they have no outlet at all it's like it
| begins to grow and starts to dominate them.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > if they have no outlet at all it's like it begins to
| grow and starts to dominate them.
|
| We're a social species so a big component of our thinking
| is in community with others. When that community is
| healthy our rougher edges are smoothed out, when that
| community is lopsided or absent altogether then we drift
| and warp.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
|
| Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other
| illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce
| irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to
| leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we're
| practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any
| public communication mechanism.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about speakers.
| unwise-exe wrote:
| Sure. Being active online is one way to try to drum up expose
| if you're trying to make a career out of public speaking.
|
| Which potentially has _implications_ if your area of interest
| isn 't inherently tied to the main polarization axis.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I meant loud speakers, like Sony or Bose. Super tweeters are
| a type of high frequency driver used in audio speakers.
| enviclash wrote:
| Is it only me perceiving that people is growing aware of the
| disadvantages of twitter, or at least its frequent use?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Most people on Twitter have referred to Twitter as "this
| hellsite" enough times that I can't say that I think this is
| anything new. Knowing Twitter is terrible and terrible for you
| is a prominent part of Twitter culture. There are many memes
| around the subject.
| bombcar wrote:
| A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely
| because there are people on it who _disagree_ with them.
|
| The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is
| full of people who _agree_ with you.
| enviclash wrote:
| I wonder if Discord will be one day a sort of "Twitter of
| Twitters" dealing with all these issues, with some servers
| focusing on Echo Chambers and other servers on either
| organized discussions or flame bait.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'd consider them slightly different. "Hellsite" is a pretty
| common epithet for sites that are the brain version of cotton
| candy or Taco Bell: Very few people are under the impression
| that Tumblr or (to show my age) Fanfiction.Net were
| productive ways to spend their time. But 'hellsite' to me has
| a connotation of 'is devoid of intellectual/emotional
| stimulation and challenge' along with 'harmless'.
|
| What grandparent commentator is talking about is, to me, more
| about realizing that Twitter isn't Taco Bell: It's _arsenic_.
| Or lead in makeup: Actively, immediately harmful. Not just
| 'bad for you'.
| jraedisch wrote:
| Twitter is the worst, apart from all the other social networks.
| enviclash wrote:
| And do you think that Discord will be one day A Place For
| Educated discussions about multiple topics like those we have
| here?
| petesergeant wrote:
| As someone from one of the many countries with a
| right/left/liberal split, I really don't like that American
| politics conflates left and liberal together.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Ignorance is kind of our stock in trade, though.
| lkrubner wrote:
| It's the result of the 2 party system. From 1860 to 1932 the
| liberals and the conservatives belonged to one political party,
| as is common elsewhere. After 1932, racial issues, and civil
| rights issues, brought the liberals together with the labor
| unions, and since then the "liberals" have been seen as
| belonging to the left.
|
| However, during the 1800s and early 1900s, the word
| "conservative" continued to hold its monarchist overtones, and
| therefore it was rejected by all American politicians,
| regardless of their party. The first presidential candidate to
| describe himself as a "conservative" was Barry Goldwater in
| 1964.
| Bakary wrote:
| That's because the "actual" left was dormant or in small
| numbers until a decade ago
| ceejayoz wrote:
| honkdaddy wrote:
| I think the two party system is ultimately to blame for this,
| though I have no idea what the solution would be. Up in
| Canada, we have three left-leaning parties, NDP, Liberal, and
| Green, which represent some very different political views
| but all have varying levels of representation in our
| parliament.
|
| After living in the States a few years it's become clear that
| none of the 3rd parties are taken very seriously, and if
| you're not R you've gotta be D, and vice versa. For a country
| where I've met so many sharp and politically sophisticated
| folks, I think it's a bummer they have one binary choice when
| it comes to their national vote.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Within each party is where you find the subdivisions.
| Democrats have within them Socialists to classical
| liberals" and the Republicans have MAGA to traditional
| liberals. It's fluid though.
|
| It's within the primary elections where you see the most
| interesting elections at times. Sometimes you'll get a
| challenger in a district where it makes sense, like when
| AOC took on an established classical liberal and flipped
| it, pushing the representation leftward while still being
| Democrat.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I don't think this is why. Look at the number of Bernie
| supporters. I think what's really going on is that the right-
| wing media has a strategy of shifting the Overton window by
| calling liberals "left" and those same liberals have little
| problem with that because they consider themselves left, not
| knowing any better.
| mhneu wrote:
| It's not just the word liberal, which means something
| different for most Americans than its meaning in other
| countries. In Australia, the Liberal party is the
| conservatives who are allied with Murdoch.
|
| The word "neoliberal" is also a problem. It is used
| negatively and aimed at a broad swath of center-left to
| center-right.
|
| But in other countries, the people called "neoliberals"
| would be understood to be conservatives. Instead of using
| "n*liberals", we should be calling them "conservatives".
| Larry Summers, for example, is a conservative.
| eternalban wrote:
| We should start using descriptive names. It is hard to
| confuse just who are the "money decides and confers
| authority" party from the "not everything is about money"
| party to "god speaks to me and says this is how you do
| it" party. Also those donkeys and elephants are pretty
| ambiguous as well. How about snakes and scorpions? Isn't
| that more descriptive?
| thrown_22 wrote:
| SamBam wrote:
| This is a completely mistaken use of the word
| "neoliberal." Neoliberalism refers to a worldview that
| thinks in terms of market-oriented policies, global
| trade, privatization, etc. You thinking it has something
| to do with wokism or OK symbols is a perfect example of
| the word being used incorrectly.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Correct. I don't understand why you're being down-voted
| for stating something that's so incontrovertible. Neo-
| liberalism is an economic philosophy that aims to turn
| back the clock on Keynesian (or New Deal for the other
| side of the Atlantic) policies and return to "laissez-
| faire" capitalism of the 19th Century.
|
| It's orthogonal to social liberalism (or "wokism"), i.e.,
| one could be an advocate of privatisation of state
| services and just as easily be socially conservative or
| socially liberal.
| rr888 wrote:
| I'm really not sure who you're talking about now. Sounds
| like Russian BS. Do you have a source for any of these
| three things?
|
| > were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate
| symbol used by secret Nazis
|
| > Ukraine having 20% of it's army wear literal swastikas
|
| > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that
| bad.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate
| symbol used by secret Nazis
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-
| gesture...
|
| > Today they argue that Ukraine having 20% of it's army
| wear literal swastikas
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-
| turns-a-...
|
| > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that
| bad.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32868328
| quantified wrote:
| First, "neoliberals" aren't supporting any of this.
|
| Second, your facts are wrong. The ok sign stuff was some
| very sensitive people pushed by foreign propaganda.
| Militias aren't the army. That's why they're militias.
| Like calling the Wagner Group the Russian Army.
| rr888 wrote:
| Thanks for replying, some of the assertions didn't seem
| right now I see where you come from. I didn't classify
| ADL as neo-con. The Wapo article does say there are a few
| thousand far right soldiers, which I think is well known,
| it certainly isn't 20% of its army. The last quote is
| post on HN, which I dont think is proof of any official
| neo-con policy.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| That user had said neoliberal, not neocon.
| Test0129 wrote:
| > I'm really not sure who you're talking about now.
| Sounds like Russian BS. Do you have a source for any of
| these three things?
|
| Absolutely classic "I don't have even a modicum of desire
| to make an effort to read so I expect you present sources
| _I agree with_ for me ".
|
| Comical "anything I don't like is Russian" response.
| rr888 wrote:
| That is why I asked, the points made were different from
| anything out of even the fringe.
|
| > Comical "anything I don't like is Russian" response.
|
| I agree calling people a bot is too common, but in this
| case Russians are the main people calling Zelensky's
| government and country Nazi.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Look at the number of Bernie supporters.
|
| Mostly liberal, not leftist. (Even if they were, Bernie'd
| _prove_ the point.)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm not convinced these kind of semantic disputes matter. Non-
| Americans don't typically identify as "libertarian", but that
| doesn't make it hard to express or describe the idea of being
| pro-business and anti-regulation.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > being pro-business and anti-regulation
|
| The word "liberal" means exactly that - showing preference
| and deference to private enterprise - in the overwhelming
| majority of the world, as it refers to economic liberalism.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> I'm not convinced these kind of semantic disputes
| matter. Non-Americans don't typically identify as
| "libertarian", but that doesn't make it hard to express or
| describe the idea of being pro-business and anti-
| regulation.
|
| > The word "liberal" means exactly that - showing
| preference and deference to private enterprise - in the
| overwhelming majority of the world, as it refers to
| economic liberalism.
|
| Except in America, where it took on a somewhat narrower,
| variant meaning that focuses on "social liberalism."
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Except in America, where it took on a somewhat
| narrower, variant meaning that focuses on "social
| liberalism."
|
| Right and you'll find large populations of both Democrats
| and Republicans fall under the "Socially liberal,
| fiscally conservative" banner with Democrats generally
| skewing one way a bit and Republicans the other. But
| ultimately, both sides headed the same direction just at
| different speeds and priority.
|
| I think the woke left and MAGA types have made more noise
| lately and it has disturbed some of the balance we've had
| the last 70 years where everyone is essentially onboard
| with the New Deal Regime.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > New Deal Regime
|
| Weird that the mainstream gets to claim this when they
| advocate against anything resembling any of it any
| opportunity they get.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Not really though. We are so immersed in it and the
| country is so different today than before it that we
| don't even notice it. We went from a pure capitalist
| country (where government in large part existed to clear
| way for capitalist projects and ambitions) to a very
| managed one with the New Deal. Social safety nets,
| benefits and entitlements, fiscal and monetary policy,
| and government "programs"/departments numbering in the
| hundreds or thousands did not exist before the New Deal.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm very curious, but what does "liberal" mean in your context?
| What country are you in?
|
| I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-
| left-liberal distinction.
|
| But in case it helps explain, at least in America, "liberal"
| has the basic connotation of "individual equality". Originally
| this meant equality before the law, often called "classical
| liberalism" which both left and right generally endorse.
|
| But then the left become associated with a greater expanded
| equality -- more social programs, safety nets, education, etc.
| The left therefore became associated with the term "liberal"
| while the right with "conservative" -- liberals interested in
| greater social equality, conservatives believing in more of a
| natural social hierarchy (still on top of _legal_ equality).
| Then conservatives came up with the moderately-used term
| "neoliberal" to promote their market-based economic policies
| based on classical liberalism, in opposition to the left-wing
| expanded equality social policies. There's also the term
| "libertarian" which refers to classical liberalism without
| anything added -- no social equality of the left, and also no
| conservative cultural values of the right.
|
| But nevertheless, I'm extremely curious to know what you call
| liberal that is distinct from both right and left?
| petesergeant wrote:
| > what does "liberal" mean in your context? What country are
| you in?
|
| I quite like the definitions here[0] honestly, and to quote
| from that:
|
| > We believe markets are astonishingly good at creating
| wealth but less good at distributing that wealth. We support
| a market-based economy that promotes economic growth and
| nurtures innovation, while also supporting a safety net that
| shares the gains of that growth with everyone.
|
| In the UK, I would contrast that with a left who are
| skeptical of free markets, and a right who are skeptical that
| anyone who doesn't accumulate wealth under free markets
| should be entitled to any.
|
| Assuming you're American, and assuming my memory of their
| positions is correct, Elizabeth Warren is a liberal where
| Bernie is a leftist.
|
| [0] https://cnliberalism.org/overview
| crazygringo wrote:
| OK, I see what you mean. Does that correspond to actual
| political parties in the UK? Is there a "liberal" party
| that is considered neither left nor right?
|
| I would say that in the US, what you're calling liberal
| would translate to "centrist/mainstream Democrats" who
| believe in the market but also in a social safety net. In
| other words, the majority of Democrats. But we also just
| call that the left, because it's the mainstream political
| viewpoint that is opposite to the right.
|
| What you are calling the left, we call "progressive", which
| is why you see so many references to the "progressive wing"
| of the Democrats. Which includes Bernie and also AOC, who
| also call themselves "socialists", but in the US this
| doesn't mean communist -- it's not about government
| ownership, but vastly stronger regulation, protection, and
| government action generally.
|
| While Elizabeth Warren is really her own idiosyncratic
| category. She's doing her own thing that isn't really
| aligned with mainstream Democrats _or_ with the
| progressives, or with anybody else particularly. If
| anything, you might call her more "technocrat" than
| anything else.
|
| But at the end of the day I hope I've answered your
| question as to why liberal = left in the US. Because
| liberal means pro-equality, and for whatever historical
| reasons, equality moved from mere legal equality to a more
| robust equality of opportunity. And we use "classical
| liberal" to distinguish the old liberal from the new.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a
| right-left-liberal distinction.
|
| America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought
| have any relationship to "left." In Australia, the right-wing
| party is called the Liberal Party.
|
| "Liberals" are free market advocates who support change
| through competition and a hands off approach by government.
| "Conservatives" prefer the government support of firm moral
| values and established traditional institutions.
|
| Somehow the US thinks that "liberal" means having a concerned
| look on your face, and that it's somehow related to
| communism, which takes the exact opposite position on the
| liberal's only defining belief. Communism shares so much more
| with conservatism, starting with an absolute belief in the
| importance of morality and institutions. Communism's major
| difference from conservatism is that it believes that the
| traditional institutions were created and controlled by a
| small group of inbred people for a small group of inbred
| people (which is undeniable, but also when conservatives get
| off the bus.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _America is the only country in which "liberal" is
| thought have any relationship to "left."_
|
| That's simply not true. Because "liberal" is a word that
| means many different things in many different countries,
| it's a famously malleable term.
|
| For example, Wikipedia says (emphasis mine):
|
| > The definition of liberal party is highly debatable...
| This is a broad political current, _including left-wing,
| centrist and right-wing elements._ All liberal parties
| emphasise individual rights, but they _differ in their
| opinion on an active role for the state._ This list
| includes parties of different character, _ranging from
| classical liberalism to social liberalism, conservative
| liberalism to national liberalism..._ [1]
|
| Indeed, a quick search for the term "left" on that page
| shows that "liberal" is used to describe leftist parties in
| the Bahamas, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Trinidad
| and Tobago, Croatia, and North Macedonia at least. It's not
| just an American thing.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_parties_by_country
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Liberal as defined by a leftist tends to mean, in my
| experience, a deference to less regulated markets, and
| support for needs based social programs.
|
| Leftists (so called) economically challenge the idea that
| markets are inherently good, asserting that many industries
| should not be market based. Health insurance, prisons,
| schools, and so on. They tend to be more open to universal
| social programs which don't require stringent needs testing.
|
| Leftists tend to distinguish themselves from liberals more
| than distinguish liberals from conservatives in my
| experience. I would say liberals in America have much higher
| respect for marginalized groups, and they seem to have a
| desire to solve problems, as opposed to Republicans.
|
| edit at 1636 UTC: My above comment is quickly thought out and
| from mobile. I think "party alignment" would be somewhat more
| complex if our voting system allowed more than two parties to
| exist.
| antonymy wrote:
| Every time I think about how to improve Twitter I inevitably
| conclude the simplest solution that generates the most net good
| for the world is to remove it from the internet. This is true for
| virtually all social media, however. The way these networking
| sites are set up is practically an invitation to bad actors and
| social engineers to manipulate large swathes of society, or at
| best, simply exploit people for advertising money. I don't think
| the good from these sites outweighs the bad, not even close.
| People who use them tend to become miserable, misinformed, and
| distracted. I have faith the internet can supply a better
| alternative for disseminating useful, timely information than
| Twitter. God I hope so, anyway, because if Twitter is the best we
| can do then there is no hope.
| ausbah wrote:
| I think if social media wasn't designed to be addictive it
| would be great. less feed curation, less infinite scrolling,
| etc.
| sh4un wrote:
| equalsione wrote:
| "Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or
| "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for
| around 60% of tweets."
|
| Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative.
| e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
| ec109685 wrote:
| They don't ask "are you a conservative" but ask questions to
| tease that out. Whether they are making accurate
| classifications, not sure.
|
| And if you look at the graph below, it does seem to show
| Twitter users who post political opinions skew liberal.
| slg wrote:
| >The more interesting part comes when we use the "how often do
| you use/post" questions to ask not what the distribution of users
| looks like, but what the distribution of tweets looks like:
|
| >Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or
| "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for
| around 60% of tweets.
|
| Where did this 60% come from? Did the author really translate
| survey responses along the lines of a user "sometimes" posting
| political content and uses Twitter "a few times each week" to a
| direct percentage of all tweets? This isn't even getting into
| that "using" Twitter doesn't necessarily mean posting tweets.
| PKop wrote:
| >Twitter Is Not Real Life
|
| Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or
| quality.
|
| Quoting comment section of that article:
|
| "This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that
| use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated
| people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of
| the population that influences and controls this world."
|
| Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are
| those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4
| channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of
| even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life".
|
| Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most
| people's references points for understanding significant portions
| of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not
| first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from
| extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in
| various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed
| to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other
| nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.
| trgn wrote:
| Wrt baudrillard. It always strikes me how well the modern
| condition was understood by the 70s. It's equally baffling how
| little has changed. Perhaps more specifically, the internet is
| not nearly as much of a transformational technology than say
| the industrial processes that enabled commoditization or the
| telecommunication and image reproduction technologies that
| enabled instant broadcasting.
| imbnwa wrote:
| During the Bush era, my debate coach in HS made the interesting
| point that neocon conservatives were more 'post-modern' (a
| tortured term 20 years later) relative to old-school 'truth-
| seeking', anti-imperialist Leftists like Chomsky
| trgn wrote:
| > a tortured term 20 years later
|
| To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary
| term, rather than an epoch.
|
| Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and
| understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its
| technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw
| the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and
| capitulated.
|
| In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia
| from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same
| mountain as it has since then.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Pretty much anything in here applies to journalism as well. We
| see bias in _all_ outlets. Nobody reports on the mundane day to
| day, only the exceptional events. This leads to a skewed view of
| the world, even if they leave other biases out of it. There 's
| also group-think where every network is carrying 90%+ of the same
| story (even if the takes are polar opposite).
|
| I wouldn't call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should
| understand and see through the biases. It's a poor model given
| the realities though.
| bnralt wrote:
| I think this overlooks the biggest issue. It's not just that
| Twitter (and most online forums) aren't representative of the
| public at large. It's that these sites are driven by a tiny
| number of hyper-online turbo posters, many of whom are likely
| mentally unwell. It's worth reading this post: "Most of What You
| Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1].
|
| Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think
| these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person
| to be active in multiple internet communities. I've been
| surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up
| as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on
| Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated
| topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name
| and beliefs).
|
| The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had
| mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a
| park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they
| plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and
| Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it's easy to
| think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online
| site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online
| all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the
| platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these
| problems).
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
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