I quit Twitter 1 year ago this week and couldn’t be happier about my decision. The time distance has made me realize how banal the whole thing is. I used to think I was staying in the loop of what society is thinking about. In retrospect, it was really just the loudest 1% and didn’t represent what anyone I know in real life was talking about.
The internet in general is prone to “the loudest 1%” problem, but Twitter is something special where it’s the craziest and loudest 0.01%.
It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
It's not so much the internet as it is websites with voting and “like” systems.
I notice it too on H.N.; it would not surprise me if 75% of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more extreme.
The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment, dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone to impulsive angry decisions than the latter.
I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading.
Was JS Twitter itself toxic? Because if not I don't see why you wouldn't just follow the relevant accounts and not see any of the stuff the article talks about.
I created two accounts, one for political screaming and the other for "sane" follows, like programmers and scientists and artists etc. I ended up only paying attention to the screaming Twitter just deleted it.
I used to do the same, but then realized I wasn't missing anything. What about JS related discourse is remotely important and what kind of stuff doesn't make it onto other channels?
> It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, & retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead, never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus, something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing.
I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I still think the network of people model is incredible. But also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years. There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the defining problem was that there was much less interesting stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works, way more really good libraries. And there's way way less inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas.
I think a big thing is that Twitter can often repræsent itself as though what many outside of it call “Twitter views” are more mainstream than they are.
4chan, for instance, also comes with rather niche views, but does not attempt to convince one that it's views are anything but niche.
Being immersed in Twitter, and many other websites known to create “filter bubbles”, eventually might make one believe it is the mainstream.
In fact, it is not so dissimilar from how I think U.S.A. culture works; it is often noted how often inhabitants inside of it loose perspective of how idiosyncratic U.S.A. cultural memes are nothing more than that, as the people there often phrase them as though they be of a more global, even timeless nature.
At a personal perspective it is best to quit most social media channels including Twitter for a daily surfing craving because only a handful people whom you care & whom you matter the most would be there waiting on social media. Most of my closed people miss the personal touch, some free time jumping around to the ground and spending time at some pals place and hate to talk on Social media while we can do many more things out of the Internet box. It's what matters. History of our online usage can be used by advertisers but not by our loved ones.
Outside those who perform certain uncommon jobs, paying attention to non-local news more frequent than quarterly, at most, isn't of much more value than keeping up with a soap opera, or a reality singing competition, or reading tabloids. It's a low-value entertainment pastime. Fine in the same way those other things are, but not more laudable. People trick themselves, or get tricked, into thinking keeping up day-to-day or week-to-week matters and that doing so is somehow improving, but it doesn't and it's not. The time would almost always be better spent—if being better-informed or a better citizen or whatever is the intended outcome—reading a book.
That's even more true when the news takes the form of something like Twitter.
If you enjoy it, keep it up, but don't think it somehow capital-M Matters.
Anything curated and not subject to engagement algorithms. Every publication has a newsletter, or you can just check their websites directly once per day.
I quit Twitter around 2014/5. I couldn’t figure out why people were posting about inane topics (what I ate for breakfast etc.) and not talking about subjects that matter (politics, corruption etc.). In particular why weren’t celebrities with huge followings not talking about important issues.
Well, how wrong was I. I’d love to go back to that time.
I guess the author was kept around by the need to comment and interact. Seems like an aspect that I don't hear about to much. Usually people seem to talk about scrolling, consuming and time wasting on these sites. I can kind of relate to this behavior.(even here I'm commenting, sharing my pointless thoughts lol)
I guess she just has a need and strong desire to share thoughts and write them down. Considering she seems to be enough of an author to be published writing is something she likes to do. Twitter would be another outlet for that. Is that so bad, as long as its not interfering with the rest of her life. Seems like she still is writing long articles regularly.
I feel like i got wrapped up in the need to comment too. I did do some similar experiments on my self. The trigger for this was political stuff. A little more drastically i went and deleted my twitter account, to my surprise the account is actually fully gone after 30 days. I never felt like putting the effort to get an account back so that habit is pretty much gone. Facebook doesn't have much of a network for me anymore, feels like its dying so it doesn't get much use from me except for linking with instagram. Instagram i only use as a photo sharing place and to see artwork, not really a commenter there. Disconnecting from reddit was interesting, i found my self still wanting to comment, and make throwaway jokes. Nothing thoughtful, dumb shit i thought would be funny. Sometimes I would see a small comment suggesting something wrong and wanted to them know. It feels like weird behavior.
Overall i guess i wonder why we make comments, like what drives this behavior. Then why most other people don't participate. I think only 1% or something of an online community actually contribute. These comments seem to be somewhere between actually sharing thoughts and socializing but not quite either.
I think we make comments because we want our thoughts and opinions to be validated by someone else. With Twitter, you have an endless list of trending topics to discuss, and an endless list of people to discuss them.
In real life, you have to bring up a topic and provide some context surrounding it before you can even share your opinion on it. Even then, your conversation partner may not even be interested in what you have to say. But on social media, someone out there must be interested in your thoughts, and is likely well-versed in it (they're also tweeting actively), so you post it. You get a 'like' or a response for your thought or opinion. You feel good.
The thing is, opinions require zero energy or effort. You just have them. I think that's part of what makes it addictive. You don't have to do any work, just share your thoughts, and you'll get feedback from the system. That feedback feels good. With enough feedback, you're soon sharing the most pithy thoughts, or most banal facts just to get another hit.
I got the feeling she wanted to write something pithy in response to current events (understandable as she's a good writer), but it was eating up her time. She mentions the site effectively stopped her reading books.
It's also bizarre that people need to share every private thought and action with the world. An author died and she re-read their book. How much of that impulse stemmed from a inform the public about it?
I think a big part of it is that it feels like we are losing our chance to influence society. That can come back to bite us when people go to vote, based on what they’ve learned on social media. So it creates an urgency to throw something out there so that we aren’t bystanders to the formation of societal opinions.
It's hard to respect the "Verified" users if you knew they all have tweet counts that when divided by hours since they joined the platform it comes out at over 1 tweet an hour every hour for 9+ years.
You can check this yourself using the wayback machine to see all their counts from before it was hidden. Pretty much every popular personality on Twitter is hopelessly addicted to it and you realize how little value their views have when they must be staring at it for hours and hours a day.
But tweet counts aren’t hidden? In the iOS app, they show up at the top when you scroll down a user timeline. On the web app, it’s always visible on the sticky header of a user’s profile/timeline
Twitter users at this scale often have content teams that post for them. Also, 1/hour is 24/day which you can easily reach by making 2-3 original posts and then spamming out a few short replies to comments. Should not take more than 1 or 2 hours of your day if you find your proper groove.
I find twitter really good for staying abreast of local emergencies. Fire in the area, road closed etc. All the EMS are on it and post near real time updates when stuff is going on.
Twitter is about the worst platform I've seen. It's worse than all the "chan" websites and I don't know how they are allowed to continue.
The only major difference I can see between the two are the political and ideological opposites. On the chans it's A-OK to post about wiping out some "inferior race", while on Twitter wiping out or mistreating men is accepted. All kinds of kink porn is easily found on Twitter (which was a big surprise), people confess to crimes, harass each other, dox and send death threats to "the other side", spread fake news, falsely accuse each other with real world consequences, and so much more. Yet somehow, Twitter is a standard app on devices, newspapers, governments, underage kids and grandpas use it.
Your fallacy is assuming that Twitter is the same thing for everyone. I have none of what you describe in my timeline, mostly because I don't go out of my way to search for this stuff.
Your argument is not unlike "why is the government supporting the printing of books when some books contain inflammatory speech and bomb building manuals" (though obviously not a 1:1 equivalence because books don't have algorithmic recommendations by themselves).
A bit from Bo Burnham's new special "Inside" has really resonated with me. He essentially says that people are increasingly treating real life as some sort of coal mine - a place where they go to extract something (an experience, an opinion, whatever) and then bring it back to the surface to share and use in the digital world.
The Atlantic has consistently done a good job of balancing perspectives, at least along certain axes. They were the first mainstream/prestige publication I can recall that dared to criticize the illiberal swing the left was taking, during a period when there was quite a chilling effect around doing so (with Haight's Coddling of the American Mind article, in 2015).
They're exactly the publication I'd expect to publish something that breaks with the groupthink infecting the rest of the industry.
Readit News
It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
> all JS related discourse moved to Twitter
The jokes write themselves at this point :v
I notice it too on H.N.; it would not surprise me if 75% of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more extreme.
The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment, dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone to impulsive angry decisions than the latter.
I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading.
Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, & retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead, never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus, something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing.
I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I still think the network of people model is incredible. But also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years. There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the defining problem was that there was much less interesting stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works, way more really good libraries. And there's way way less inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas.
JS left college, got a job, got boring.
4chan, for instance, also comes with rather niche views, but does not attempt to convince one that it's views are anything but niche.
Being immersed in Twitter, and many other websites known to create “filter bubbles”, eventually might make one believe it is the mainstream.
In fact, it is not so dissimilar from how I think U.S.A. culture works; it is often noted how often inhabitants inside of it loose perspective of how idiosyncratic U.S.A. cultural memes are nothing more than that, as the people there often phrase them as though they be of a more global, even timeless nature.
That's even more true when the news takes the form of something like Twitter.
If you enjoy it, keep it up, but don't think it somehow capital-M Matters.
Well, how wrong was I. I’d love to go back to that time.
I guess she just has a need and strong desire to share thoughts and write them down. Considering she seems to be enough of an author to be published writing is something she likes to do. Twitter would be another outlet for that. Is that so bad, as long as its not interfering with the rest of her life. Seems like she still is writing long articles regularly.
I feel like i got wrapped up in the need to comment too. I did do some similar experiments on my self. The trigger for this was political stuff. A little more drastically i went and deleted my twitter account, to my surprise the account is actually fully gone after 30 days. I never felt like putting the effort to get an account back so that habit is pretty much gone. Facebook doesn't have much of a network for me anymore, feels like its dying so it doesn't get much use from me except for linking with instagram. Instagram i only use as a photo sharing place and to see artwork, not really a commenter there. Disconnecting from reddit was interesting, i found my self still wanting to comment, and make throwaway jokes. Nothing thoughtful, dumb shit i thought would be funny. Sometimes I would see a small comment suggesting something wrong and wanted to them know. It feels like weird behavior.
Overall i guess i wonder why we make comments, like what drives this behavior. Then why most other people don't participate. I think only 1% or something of an online community actually contribute. These comments seem to be somewhere between actually sharing thoughts and socializing but not quite either.
In real life, you have to bring up a topic and provide some context surrounding it before you can even share your opinion on it. Even then, your conversation partner may not even be interested in what you have to say. But on social media, someone out there must be interested in your thoughts, and is likely well-versed in it (they're also tweeting actively), so you post it. You get a 'like' or a response for your thought or opinion. You feel good.
The thing is, opinions require zero energy or effort. You just have them. I think that's part of what makes it addictive. You don't have to do any work, just share your thoughts, and you'll get feedback from the system. That feedback feels good. With enough feedback, you're soon sharing the most pithy thoughts, or most banal facts just to get another hit.
It's also bizarre that people need to share every private thought and action with the world. An author died and she re-read their book. How much of that impulse stemmed from a inform the public about it?
It's hard to respect the "Verified" users if you knew they all have tweet counts that when divided by hours since they joined the platform it comes out at over 1 tweet an hour every hour for 9+ years.
You can check this yourself using the wayback machine to see all their counts from before it was hidden. Pretty much every popular personality on Twitter is hopelessly addicted to it and you realize how little value their views have when they must be staring at it for hours and hours a day.
The only major difference I can see between the two are the political and ideological opposites. On the chans it's A-OK to post about wiping out some "inferior race", while on Twitter wiping out or mistreating men is accepted. All kinds of kink porn is easily found on Twitter (which was a big surprise), people confess to crimes, harass each other, dox and send death threats to "the other side", spread fake news, falsely accuse each other with real world consequences, and so much more. Yet somehow, Twitter is a standard app on devices, newspapers, governments, underage kids and grandpas use it.
Is it just money?
Your argument is not unlike "why is the government supporting the printing of books when some books contain inflammatory speech and bomb building manuals" (though obviously not a 1:1 equivalence because books don't have algorithmic recommendations by themselves).
To live for onself onto one self is hard. Much easier to share your life and convince yourself it has meaning through external validation.
There’s rarely peace in one owns head. The hollow solace lies outside of us, with true peace hard to achieve, if achievable at all.
It is now that life imitates art.
They're exactly the publication I'd expect to publish something that breaks with the groupthink infecting the rest of the industry.