1. There is a 4chan meme that goes approximately like this:
Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?"
Veteran: "4chan was never good."
"4chan" can be easily replaced with "Twitter" or "The Internet" here.
2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago.
> 2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago.
I'm afraid that whilst there's some truth in what you've said, I think you're far wide of the mark here.
It's not about getting old. It's about the fact that, and I wouldn't pretend to understand the mechanics here, for whatever reason when too many people get involved in something it changes. It might get better, or it might get worse, or it might get better and then get worse, or whatever.
In this case I think the point that twitter, or whatever, somehow gets "spoiled" is perhaps valid. I would argue I've seen a similar thing with facebook. It used to be people posting updates about themselves and was a good way to keep up with people; now it's largely people sharing pre-created content - 10th rate jokes and memes, political petitions, news - real or otherwise - from a parasitic ecosystem of sites predicated upon social sharing.
That spoiling can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and can take either a short or a long time to happen. The point is that a large influx of newcomers into an existing community, business, special interest group, or whatever, can radically alter the dynamics of that group in a way that is unpredictable, and sometimes not good.
And I apologise for the slightly rambling nature of this comment - haven't had time to edit it into shape.
> 2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old.
Nothing to do with the truth? Maybe in your cases, but in others it very much does. In the good ol' days Democrats and Republicans weren't as hostile and unwilling to work together as they are now. In the good ol' days it used to snow way more in some places than it does now. In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now. In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones. In the good ol' days businesses had longer-lasting relationships with their employees and didn't view them as disposable goods. Yeah, totally nothing to do with the truth, just people imagining things.
LA is way less polluted than it used to be. People used to go to speed dating events where they have a pool of maybe 15 people who might be compatible. Democrats and Republicans both used to be racist and sexist. The weather in New England is much more pleasant in winter than it used to be. These days it isn't a black mark against your name if you've changed jobs 3 times because you wanted to try something new.
All about perspective. If you want to reminisce, go ahead, but there are two sides to the coin.
I think the specific psycho phenomenon is that if there were 5 good things and 5 bad things about dating in the 50s, we generally remember the good things and talk about the good things. Now with tindr there's also 5 good and 5 bad and we say "wow all these bad things suck, back then it was just [the 5 good things that they remember]".
Remembering the good vs the bad probably aligns with someone being naturally upbeat or sad (glass full vs half-full personality).
Also I'm skeptical of that Democrats and Repubs line. In the good old days they got into fist fights on the congress floor.
> In the good ol' days businesses had longer-lasting relationships with their employees and didn't view them as disposable goods.
This is the kind of thing the GP is talking about, and you've fallen into the trap. The rise of OH&S is a clear counterpoint to your statement here. For example, about a hundred people died during the building of the Hoover Dam. Such a death rate would be unthinkable in the modern era.
> In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones.
And if you were gay or even asexual, you had to pretend that you weren't or you'd be ostracised. Even to the point of marrying someone straight and making both of you miserable. And if you were pregnant, you were expected to hide yourself from public view, because being visible pregnant used to be distasteful.
> In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now.
Good old weasel word 'many'. Many places are less polluted now than they were then.
The point is that you're cherrypicking just the good stuff, which is exactly what the GP is talking about. Few people would actually be better off if you turned the clock back 40 years, especially women and minorities.
There CAN be clean & neat progress (sorry for the caps) without the garbage. It's just that people don't care to make it nice and clean, they prefer to built on the momentum, they prefer to make it quick and dirty and if/when necessary tear it down and start again.
Twitter is like the planet. Dying. Slowly. But. Steadily.
Stephen is a big boy and can make big boy choices. I still don't get the infatuation with the social media, unless your livelihood depends on it (e.g. marketing your products/services, or plain and simple you ARE facebook or twitter or ... that make money out of these products)(products = people).
Except for the fact that both sites (twitter and 4chan) have both become substantially worse over the years.
In both cases, a lot of it has to do with increased censorship. A large number of people left 4chan for 8chan after moot started engaging in fairly aggressive political censorship. Who knows what his motivation was - maybe an effort to appeal more to advertisers, maybe a change in beliefs about freedom of expression - either way, the effect was the same. There was a big exodus to other chan sites.
Twitter has a similar censorship problem; many of the twitter accounts I followed, which were mildly offensive but nothing compared to the worst of the site, were silently banned without justification. The only connection I can find between them is that they were political in a way Twitter didn't like. Unfortunately, twitter is too big for there to be an effective exodus, so the whole internet is just worse off.
Not all nostalgia is misplaced. The internet is unquestionably changing, and the trend seems to be that as a system becomes more popular, it becomes more hostile to viewpoints too far from its median. Reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely ban-happy in recent years, moreso than ever before.
>Not all nostalgia is misplaced. The internet is unquestionably changing, and the trend seems to be that as a system becomes more popular, it becomes more hostile to viewpoints too far from its median
That's not a current trend, that's just statistics. The larger the sample is, the closer it's median is to the median of the whole set of data. It was always this way.
However, people can still build their own smaller on-line communities. With sites like Reddit, it's easier than even. You have r/TumblrInAction, r/ShitRedditSays, and everything in between.
I think there is more than just this: any community/social network that grows from thousands to millions of users has to make changes in order to scale (for example, changes in the moderation).
Whatever they are, these changes are likely to be a disappointment for the oldest users who join the community for what it was in the first place.
Another plausible explanation is that, as these communities become more popular, the goal of the companies supporting them often shifts from the original goal of creating a nice and attractive community, to a new more ambiguous goal of keeping the growth high while generating profit (thus adding ads, tracking etc.)
The thing is 4chan's raison d'etre is to be kinda shitty (or rather, a bit of a rough wasteland).
Twitter could clean itself if they weren't so afraid of the wannabe Nazi crews + follower bots, and the effects cleaning up would have on their already bad-looking user metrics.
There isn't. There's a tendency to paint the past in gold.
“I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen
They either grow (and change) or die. For those who liked the way they startedn, both of these.tend to look like forms of “get worse”, which is, of course, entirely subjective.
Perhaps. But there is some truth about signal to noise ratio. Just like us "old-timers" saw happening with email (spam and on mailing lists) and later on forums. The flood of average – both posters and responses – is drowning out value. Hollow emotions (and offence) are winning from uncoloured intelligence and rationality.
There's a tipping point, and I guess Twitter has gone over it.
"Getting old" is perhaps a bit prejudicial in this case. I think a better observation is that the novelty is lost for the individual, and this is true about virtually anything -- that show they liked, the club they went to, the activity they took part in, a forum on the internet: Once it loses novelty, the ugly parts become more obvious, and for those that are on the edge of benefit opinions can turn rapidly.
And to those claiming that this author is making concrete points about twitter, I would add the observation of an outsider who never understood the draw of twitter that it was always overwhelmingly a) cynical sarcasm that can be easily encapsulated in few characters, b) public disagreement. The medium itself favored caustic commentary. The purpose of Twitter has always been negative and pandering to the choir.
Nostalgia isn't an affliction of the elderly. Its presence for all ages shows it's more a recurrent lack of consideration of reality, or many other such memory and coping mechanisms. That isn't to say it's bad, but needs to be understood as limiting in context.
I find it extremely ironic that when concrete criticism about how a specific thing used to be "better" by some metric, this old chest nut is brought out, displaying the shallowness it claims to speak out against. The people who think everything "used to be better"? They're a straw man, while they may exist neither you or I even talk to them, and not one of them ever posted here or elsewhere on the internet. But they're trotted out alllllll the time. I first noticed that when I was like 20 or 21, so what was the reason then? My high IQ artificually inflating my age, me getting old before my time? Heh.
You know, back in the day people actually responded when asked something. Granted, a bullshit response was always a possibility, but not a blank and yet shameless stare.
I've been in a lot of "discussion things" over the years and i've seen them go bad. As they become more well known the worse they get. Initially somewhat-like-minded people are drawn to something for somewhat-similar reasons. When things become popular the noise from people of all walks of life drowns out the signal of like mindedness. In the case of twitter some of the noise Actively tries to ruin the signal.
The initial users of tv, radio and even cars must have felt a similar despair (after the initial thrill of their interest becoming used by more people).
It's not nostalgia, things were better "back then" where "back then" is a point between gaining users and acceptance by the general population.
Yet HN is so far managing the onslaught. Part of that is of course very tightly controlled moderation where crass behavior is immediately and severely punished, but maybe requiring civility at all times is the only way to have a meaningful discussion.
HN is widely know for being full of self absorbed white tech guys.
Yes it got more civilized in the last years, but while not being offensive it's still filled with one sided views of the world by <1% of its population.
I value the equality and freedom (and not being downmodded anonymously and unfairly) on Twitter but I also value this space. They are merely different spaces. I don't have to choose. Nobody reads all of twitter - it is what you make it. This place has a much more restricted demographic than Twitter. Twitter is shouting things in Central Park, whereas you wouldn't do that (I hope) at a wedding in New England. I hope I am always civil but only expect that in return in some spaces.
Also possible one of the least flashy UIs. It's not just about making the content stand out, Medium does it better and is quite a bit closer to Twitter in terms of quality of content/interaction. It's also about being actively simplistic, and requiring some effort from the reader.
I feel like HN is very well moderated in a way that's completely opaque which is its main strength. Users should not have to learn rules to participate, and they should not even be aware that they're breaking the rules really. Ideally they would just think that they are participating while not being aware that none of their contributions are ever seen by another user.
I think that's the recurring lesson of online communities: moderation works. Without it, the community will eventually degenerate into a haven for trolls. Unless it was always meant to be a haven for trolls; then it will become a haven for different trolls.
Maybe this is a sad lesson. I would prefer if a completely unmoderated discussion could remain civil and constructive at all times, but there's probably a reason why even panel discussions with only a handful of people need a good moderator.
HN-the-original hasn't survived the onslaught. It used to be a business + tech forum, with about a third of the articles being relevant to the business side of startups. Now it's a hacking + politics + general interest forum (no doubt due to changing 'Startup News' to 'Hacker News' and adding time). HN is managing, but it's had to pivot to do so.
For example, it used to be that an article about hiring was about the business side; how to remunerate, how to obtain the best-bang-for-your-buck. These days it's about the employee side; how scummy employers are, how they're all clueless about interview process, how to job-hop, even a little bragging about salaries.
Gone are the days of articles about A/B testing, and here are the days where there's usually a few NYTimes articles on the front page.
> maybe requiring civility at all times is the only way to have a meaningful discussion.
Communities start with who's invited (or permitted) -- with Twitter, tech movers/shakers/early adopters; Facebook, students at elite colleges; Usenet... well, students and faculty at connected colleges.
Once the community expands, it loses some of its initial intimacy and collective mindset. Perhaps we should invent social networks that keep people in little collectives of positive feedback, rather than subjecting ourselves to the negativity of warring fiefdoms.
For anyone with an open mind, please look into why India came up with the caste system. We need a more modern version of it stripped of it's incentives for exploitation of the weak.
An Alex Jones or Trump type character believe whatever they want but systems that prop them up and give them more influence than they deserve, while hiding behind terms like equality and freedom of speech are just producing an inversion of the caste system.
As someone once put it: "There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it."
I've seen any number of fora over the ages, and the debasement problem is a significant one. It's not limited to online, as the saga of The American Mercury illustrates:
My preference, increasingly, is to be acutely aware of the limits of my own time and attention, to block fuckwits with abandon, and to treasure both the individuals and fora which actually do deliver quality.
On which, a thank you to HN's mods, dang and scbt, both of whom put in a hell of a lot of work, much of it gentle, and for which HN is decidedly one of the better, and longer-lived, discussion platforms on today's Internet.
>A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know.
That's been the majority of comments / forums since at least 2001. It also sounds a whole lot like the modern "tabloid" news.
I don't know where you hang out but it seems like a recently development to me. It sounds like you either hung out in a very different corner of the internet than I did or haven't seen the worst of Twitter.
Online discourse has certainly declined in recent years. But you're right, people seeking conflict online is nothing new. What I believe HAS changed in more recent years, however, is the heavy subject matter being invoked today by these trolls. Flame wars over PC hardware and Linux distros on message boards is nothing new, but the very aggressive accusations of racism, bigotry, marginalizing, and sexism that get lobbed at people on social media is a new form of online viciousness.
It is inevitable. Why? Because the paid "influencers" such as PR firms will be attracted to any popular and/or influential discussion forum to promote the "point of view" they are paid to promote, or viewpoints they are paid to muddy or obfuscate.
Once the site/forum reaches a certain level of influence they show up, and to the casual viewer it appears as added noise.
Stephen has since returned to Twitter, though he tweets much less than he used to. I wonder if he is now treating it as a write-only medium.
I'm one of the lucky 50K people he still follows (he used to follow everyone who followed him, in the very early days of Twitter, but that quickly stopped), but when you have 12 million followers, I imagine your use of Twitter is somewhat different to most peoples.
People have a tendency to forget that famous public figures are people and feel comfortable saying mean things without thought. I think Few's experience of Twitter is probably an amplified version of what most of us know.
I still like Twitter. Compared to other online forums, it still has the most thoughtful discourse I know of (except for HN). Even if it means tolerating a bunch of unpleasant garbage along the way.
I think the fact that Twitter made a name for itself by restricting the degree to which you can actually express your thoughts (by constraining response length) doomed them.
It's far easier to be snarky and mean in 140 characters than it is to be rational and respectful.
You think, if only they were given more space, the trolls would suddenly find themselves unspinning their vitriol into coherent, well-expressed and thoughtful sentiment?
To be fair to Twitter that wasn't a philosophical decision - 140 chars was what fit into the 160-char SMS protocol limit, with the remainder given over to their own layer.
HN hasn't much of a discourse, as in discordinng ideas aren't debated but shunned and driven away.
The technical exchange is fine, but it's more of a dump of experiences and while it's worthwhile at that, it rarely goes into discussion territory, more like throwing opinions to the other side
Some of the "troll" problems come from people saying on the web what they've always said in person.
When you say nasty things about Brad Pitt among friends, it stays there. When you say it to your friends on Twitter, it can go viral and be read both by Brad, and people who, unlike your friends, don't get your humor.
There is this interesting phenomenon that in some regions, Twitter activity is not particularly high (e.g. Germany), so according to an analysis I read a while ago, a few hundred tweets within a few hours are enough to get a topic trending in the region.
So there is this effect where a small group of activists (20-30) can easily coordinate to launch a 100 tweets. They then reach out to online media outlets, which in turn report that a topic is trending, so it is officially 'news', and thus the cycle begins.
In particular, journalists are disproportionally over-represented on twitter and thus seem to (somewhat self-importantly) overvalue it as a discussion medium. At least where I am from, it is almost exclusively activists, journalists and politicians in their own Twitter bubble talking to each other and reporting about what they say about each other.
So as they believe in its importance, it becomes important, and thus opens avenues to manipulation by pr agencies or state actors or political splintergroups.
This has been working exactly the same ever since the invention of the media. This problem is not specific to Twitter. Actually doing something like this (creating something out of nothing) is PR 101.
I feel the same way. It's the exact same issue sports arena has ... if 40,000 people show up for a game, that still can't be reasonably counted as an "audience".
If they are the only 40k people interested in seeing this game and absolutely no one is watching the live transmission then it's hardly a major sporting event.
A spike of retweets from 0,05% of the users is hardly a spike. If so, you would have to call every link to a funny cat gif on twitter a "Twitter Storm".
Readit News
Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?"
Veteran: "4chan was never good."
"4chan" can be easily replaced with "Twitter" or "The Internet" here.
2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago.
I'm afraid that whilst there's some truth in what you've said, I think you're far wide of the mark here.
It's not about getting old. It's about the fact that, and I wouldn't pretend to understand the mechanics here, for whatever reason when too many people get involved in something it changes. It might get better, or it might get worse, or it might get better and then get worse, or whatever.
In this case I think the point that twitter, or whatever, somehow gets "spoiled" is perhaps valid. I would argue I've seen a similar thing with facebook. It used to be people posting updates about themselves and was a good way to keep up with people; now it's largely people sharing pre-created content - 10th rate jokes and memes, political petitions, news - real or otherwise - from a parasitic ecosystem of sites predicated upon social sharing.
That spoiling can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and can take either a short or a long time to happen. The point is that a large influx of newcomers into an existing community, business, special interest group, or whatever, can radically alter the dynamics of that group in a way that is unpredictable, and sometimes not good.
And I apologise for the slightly rambling nature of this comment - haven't had time to edit it into shape.
Nothing to do with the truth? Maybe in your cases, but in others it very much does. In the good ol' days Democrats and Republicans weren't as hostile and unwilling to work together as they are now. In the good ol' days it used to snow way more in some places than it does now. In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now. In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones. In the good ol' days businesses had longer-lasting relationships with their employees and didn't view them as disposable goods. Yeah, totally nothing to do with the truth, just people imagining things.
LA is way less polluted than it used to be. People used to go to speed dating events where they have a pool of maybe 15 people who might be compatible. Democrats and Republicans both used to be racist and sexist. The weather in New England is much more pleasant in winter than it used to be. These days it isn't a black mark against your name if you've changed jobs 3 times because you wanted to try something new.
All about perspective. If you want to reminisce, go ahead, but there are two sides to the coin.
Remembering the good vs the bad probably aligns with someone being naturally upbeat or sad (glass full vs half-full personality).
Also I'm skeptical of that Democrats and Repubs line. In the good old days they got into fist fights on the congress floor.
This is the kind of thing the GP is talking about, and you've fallen into the trap. The rise of OH&S is a clear counterpoint to your statement here. For example, about a hundred people died during the building of the Hoover Dam. Such a death rate would be unthinkable in the modern era.
> In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones.
And if you were gay or even asexual, you had to pretend that you weren't or you'd be ostracised. Even to the point of marrying someone straight and making both of you miserable. And if you were pregnant, you were expected to hide yourself from public view, because being visible pregnant used to be distasteful.
> In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now.
Good old weasel word 'many'. Many places are less polluted now than they were then.
The point is that you're cherrypicking just the good stuff, which is exactly what the GP is talking about. Few people would actually be better off if you turned the clock back 40 years, especially women and minorities.
Twitter is like the planet. Dying. Slowly. But. Steadily.
Stephen is a big boy and can make big boy choices. I still don't get the infatuation with the social media, unless your livelihood depends on it (e.g. marketing your products/services, or plain and simple you ARE facebook or twitter or ... that make money out of these products)(products = people).
In both cases, a lot of it has to do with increased censorship. A large number of people left 4chan for 8chan after moot started engaging in fairly aggressive political censorship. Who knows what his motivation was - maybe an effort to appeal more to advertisers, maybe a change in beliefs about freedom of expression - either way, the effect was the same. There was a big exodus to other chan sites.
Twitter has a similar censorship problem; many of the twitter accounts I followed, which were mildly offensive but nothing compared to the worst of the site, were silently banned without justification. The only connection I can find between them is that they were political in a way Twitter didn't like. Unfortunately, twitter is too big for there to be an effective exodus, so the whole internet is just worse off.
Not all nostalgia is misplaced. The internet is unquestionably changing, and the trend seems to be that as a system becomes more popular, it becomes more hostile to viewpoints too far from its median. Reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely ban-happy in recent years, moreso than ever before.
That's not a current trend, that's just statistics. The larger the sample is, the closer it's median is to the median of the whole set of data. It was always this way.
However, people can still build their own smaller on-line communities. With sites like Reddit, it's easier than even. You have r/TumblrInAction, r/ShitRedditSays, and everything in between.
I think there is more than just this: any community/social network that grows from thousands to millions of users has to make changes in order to scale (for example, changes in the moderation). Whatever they are, these changes are likely to be a disappointment for the oldest users who join the community for what it was in the first place.
Another plausible explanation is that, as these communities become more popular, the goal of the companies supporting them often shifts from the original goal of creating a nice and attractive community, to a new more ambiguous goal of keeping the growth high while generating profit (thus adding ads, tracking etc.)
Often there's more to it: early adopters of anything tend to be of a different temperament than the people who come after.
Twitter could clean itself if they weren't so afraid of the wannabe Nazi crews + follower bots, and the effects cleaning up would have on their already bad-looking user metrics.
Here's an interesting essay about this effect: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
“I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.” ― Alan Moore, Watchmen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris
There's a tipping point, and I guess Twitter has gone over it.
And to those claiming that this author is making concrete points about twitter, I would add the observation of an outsider who never understood the draw of twitter that it was always overwhelmingly a) cynical sarcasm that can be easily encapsulated in few characters, b) public disagreement. The medium itself favored caustic commentary. The purpose of Twitter has always been negative and pandering to the choir.
Halcyon Days: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/halcyon_days
Days of Yore: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/days_of_yore
Slashdot
twitter
I've been in a lot of "discussion things" over the years and i've seen them go bad. As they become more well known the worse they get. Initially somewhat-like-minded people are drawn to something for somewhat-similar reasons. When things become popular the noise from people of all walks of life drowns out the signal of like mindedness. In the case of twitter some of the noise Actively tries to ruin the signal.
The initial users of tv, radio and even cars must have felt a similar despair (after the initial thrill of their interest becoming used by more people).
It's not nostalgia, things were better "back then" where "back then" is a point between gaining users and acceptance by the general population.
Yes it got more civilized in the last years, but while not being offensive it's still filled with one sided views of the world by <1% of its population.
But also the tight moderation.
Maybe this is a sad lesson. I would prefer if a completely unmoderated discussion could remain civil and constructive at all times, but there's probably a reason why even panel discussions with only a handful of people need a good moderator.
For example, it used to be that an article about hiring was about the business side; how to remunerate, how to obtain the best-bang-for-your-buck. These days it's about the employee side; how scummy employers are, how they're all clueless about interview process, how to job-hop, even a little bragging about salaries.
Gone are the days of articles about A/B testing, and here are the days where there's usually a few NYTimes articles on the front page.
> maybe requiring civility at all times is the only way to have a meaningful discussion.
In larger forums, yes, but not in smaller forums.
Once the community expands, it loses some of its initial intimacy and collective mindset. Perhaps we should invent social networks that keep people in little collectives of positive feedback, rather than subjecting ourselves to the negativity of warring fiefdoms.
An Alex Jones or Trump type character believe whatever they want but systems that prop them up and give them more influence than they deserve, while hiding behind terms like equality and freedom of speech are just producing an inversion of the caste system.
http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html
I've seen any number of fora over the ages, and the debasement problem is a significant one. It's not limited to online, as the saga of The American Mercury illustrates:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury
My preference, increasingly, is to be acutely aware of the limits of my own time and attention, to block fuckwits with abandon, and to treasure both the individuals and fora which actually do deliver quality.
On which, a thank you to HN's mods, dang and scbt, both of whom put in a hell of a lot of work, much of it gentle, and for which HN is decidedly one of the better, and longer-lived, discussion platforms on today's Internet.
(Metafilter also seems particularly resilient.)
That's been the majority of comments / forums since at least 2001. It also sounds a whole lot like the modern "tabloid" news.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Once the site/forum reaches a certain level of influence they show up, and to the casual viewer it appears as added noise.
I'm one of the lucky 50K people he still follows (he used to follow everyone who followed him, in the very early days of Twitter, but that quickly stopped), but when you have 12 million followers, I imagine your use of Twitter is somewhat different to most peoples.
I still like Twitter. Compared to other online forums, it still has the most thoughtful discourse I know of (except for HN). Even if it means tolerating a bunch of unpleasant garbage along the way.
It's far easier to be snarky and mean in 140 characters than it is to be rational and respectful.
Or would they just shit-talk with more words?
To be fair to Twitter that wasn't a philosophical decision - 140 chars was what fit into the 160-char SMS protocol limit, with the remainder given over to their own layer.
The technical exchange is fine, but it's more of a dump of experiences and while it's worthwhile at that, it rarely goes into discussion territory, more like throwing opinions to the other side
I would have said the exact opposite. As long as they're well supported, HN is more accepting of controversial views than anywhere else I know.
When you say nasty things about Brad Pitt among friends, it stays there. When you say it to your friends on Twitter, it can go viral and be read both by Brad, and people who, unlike your friends, don't get your humor.
Deleted Comment
With over 300mln active users if something has been retweeted, say, 15,000 times it still can't be reasonably counted as a "storm".
So there is this effect where a small group of activists (20-30) can easily coordinate to launch a 100 tweets. They then reach out to online media outlets, which in turn report that a topic is trending, so it is officially 'news', and thus the cycle begins.
In particular, journalists are disproportionally over-represented on twitter and thus seem to (somewhat self-importantly) overvalue it as a discussion medium. At least where I am from, it is almost exclusively activists, journalists and politicians in their own Twitter bubble talking to each other and reporting about what they say about each other.
So as they believe in its importance, it becomes important, and thus opens avenues to manipulation by pr agencies or state actors or political splintergroups.
If you are not familiar but interested in learning more. This book is a good primer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
/s
A spike of retweets from 0,05% of the users is hardly a spike. If so, you would have to call every link to a funny cat gif on twitter a "Twitter Storm".
You don't need something to go VIRAL! to be blown out of proportion...