'and every fucking thing I think about, I also think, “How could I fit that into a tweet that lots of people would favorite or retweet?”'
That, as I see it, is the problem – not twitter or 140char limits or any of the other stuff Dustin raises, it's the desire for external validation (and I can't help but imagine him furiously clicking reload on his own blog post to see how fast his Kudos score is climbing…)
My takeaway/advice is - try to recognise when you're being manipulated by gamification techniques and choose to be aware of them and ignore/resist them when it's in your better interest.
Does anybody _really_ think Picasso would have painted iPad trifles for immediate social media validation, instead of starting and completeing Garçon à la pipe? I _seriously_ doubt that - from Wikipedia: "At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works."
Picasso _didn't_ paint for the twitterati - he painted for Picasso. Dustin should write for Dustin - not for Twitter. He's allowing himself to become distracted from achieving what he wants at achieve. That's not Twitters fault. Procrastinators gonna procrastinate (he said hypocritically while wasting time on HN…)
Picasso also made quick napkin sketchings for passersby. So yeah, I could imagine him painting "triffles for immediate social media validation"... he probably would've enjoyed the exposure. But that didn't prevent him from undertaking more meaningful / involved endeavors too.
On external validation, I wondered about whether a social network or community with a karma system could fake that validation for each user to motivate content creation or positive sentiment?
e.g., if I actually got 5 upvotes on a HN comment, but HN showed it to me as 54, and then 78 and then 104 on subsequent comments, would I be more likely to contribute more? As a new user, would I be drawn in deeper?
It wouldn't work too well with public validation like Twitter, but it could for something like HN (and /. from memory) where the upvote count is now hidden.
The upvote count for OTHER people's comments in now hidden. you still always see them on your own comments. So it still does have public validation mechanism.
I think you can't see it on other people's comments because this forces you to up vote something only if YOU like it and not based on what other users think. Eg on FB, a lot of people "like" stuff just because it already has a lot of likes (the need to conform)
I believe generally if a medium exists to communicate with others creative people will try to maximize how they can succeed with that medium. The unfortunate part of this is Twitter is both very popular thus potentially a way to reach a ton of people and also the bare minimum for any reasonable communication. Doubly unfortunate is that the mainstream media already oversimplifies, so while I suspect many people wish to present an alternative to how the mainstream media communicates we don't yet have a pervasive technical tool well suited for that.
My experience is that writing long, insightful pieces of prose is just hard, miserable work. People do it because they feel compelled to, not because it's a fun way to relax. So it's easy to procrastinate or avoid it, especially if there aren't any external demands or deadlines to meet.
>My experience is that writing long, insightful pieces of prose is just hard, miserable work. People do it because they feel compelled to, not because it's a fun way to relax. So it's easy to procrastinate or avoid it, especially if there aren't any external demands or deadlines to meet.
Is it a problem if they don't? There are now many, many insightful essays on the internet; one could spend a lifetime reading them and barely scratch the surface. If you were actually writing for the attention it gets you, rather than for the sake of the writing (and the comment about favourite or retweet makes me think that's his real motivation here), and then you find a more efficient way to get that validation, isn't that a good thing? The internet won't miss what you didn't write.
I dunno, it's fun for me -- I find writing a long essay to be contemplative, meditative. It requires you to challenge your own thinking, which is both interesting and a little bit scary.
But I'm willing to believe I'm an outlier in this regard.
There must be a group of people somewhere in the world that actually uses Twitter. I've never met any of them in real life, but occasionally I see things like this online that suggests that however far fetched the idea might be, it's nonetheless true.
Amazing that this author is so upset about what this random website has done to his life. I have no idea how he could have found enough value in it to have integrated it into his life so deeply. Nor can I understand why he would continue using it if it made him unhappy.
In short, seven years later, I still don't get what Twitter is for or why anybody would use it.
I was extremely surprised to hear on the radio yesterday that the Shebab (the group responsible for the mass killing and ostage situation in the kenyan mall) does its public communications through... Twitter, of all things.
A silicon valley webapp used by somalian terrorists. The modern, "connected" world is weird sometimes.
To answer your question, and although I don't use it myself, some of my friends tell me they use it a bit like IRC: when you want to discuss of a particular topic, instead of joining a particular channel you ask your question with a specific hashtag (hey, IRC channel names are hashtags after all!) and it starts a discussion. It's like a more fluid IRC where chatrooms are created, deleted, merge and fork all the time. It sound good in principle, but I like the open and distributed IRC more.
When I started out on it, I was a freelancer. It was a great way to chat about work and trivia to other people doing similar jobs, whether I had met them or not - a sort of online "water-cooler" I guess or a more visible IRC. In fact, I remember describing how to use it as "sign up, follow interesting people, talk to strangers".
But now it's much less about the conversations (I only really converse with the people I know in real-life, so it becomes a sort of public text-messaging). Instead, it's become a broadcast medium - communication is much more one-way and because of that, the number of retweets you get for your "pithy insight" becomes all the more important.
I know many people that use Facebook (including myself). It's a website that almost freaking everybody is on; it's used for sharing stuff from daily lives, instant messaging, organizing social events.
As a counter point, everyone I know is on Twitter and uses it actively, but very few are on Facebook.
In fact, we sat around a table earlier this year and were chatting about a piece of news that mentioned some exclusive content via Facebook, and realised that none of us had access. And that was fine by us, we don't really get what Facebook is for, and we just went back to talking and continued some of the conversations next day on Twitter.
My main passion is Heavy Metal. As a consumer, I use Twitter to keep up to date with tours, releases, news by following bands and music media. I use it to interact with bands.
I also have a band which has a Twitter account which is used to keep people up to date as mentioned above, and I have a music blog twitter account which I use to review gigs etc...
Much like television, smoking, or facebook, it's pretty easy for me to look at these products, look at what the users get out of them, and make the conscious decision not to use them. That isn't to say it's easy to quit smoking, but it's been pretty easy for me to never start smoking because I know what sort of personality I have.
Dustin's problem is similar in some respects to an addiction (which he alludes to), so perhaps the solution is treating it as such; forcing moderation on himself, or even complete detachment (the cold turkey approach). Of course, being involved in technology means Dustin is essentially an alcoholic working at a brewery, so disengagement may be especially difficult. But to throw up your hands and claim there's no way out strikes me as a bit defeatist. If you feel a technology is negatively impacting your thought patterns, perhaps you could find a way to use that technology less.
>*"Dustin's problem is similar in some respects to an addiction (which he alludes to), so perhaps the solution is treating it as such;"
The issue I see with this is that it takes the way we use technology for granted. It's just like saying "that stuff is here to stay, learn to deal with it".
Which it is true in practice, but doesn't have to be true necessarily.
We could have opted as a society to not tolerate those kind of addictive (and mind-crushing) applications of technology, instead of celebrating them.
(The same way we have done with smoking, not just the banning in public places, but the whole attitude towards it).
Placing the emphasis on society, I believe, dilutes the great importance of the decisions of the individual. In life you should take responsibility for your own actions first. The question is more "Is twitter a social problem?" or "Is my twitter use a problem?".
There's something very Chinese about banning social media with the ostensible goal of encouraging people to focus on their work.
(Also, where do you stop with your "addictive and mind crushing" barrier? Other forums, like HN? Video games? Fiction books? Theatre? "Thought-negating" music?)
While I agree that naive technological utopianism is worrisome and we need to be discussing the social/psychological impact of our inventions, I can't say I would draw an equivalence between Twitter and something like cigarettes... if used in moderation, I think services like Twitter can be very useful to some people. We do need to weigh the costs vs. the benefits, but just as blind acceptance is bad, so is blind rejection... having this discussion is a good start though.
Dealing with addictions has little to do with leaving them, and everything to do with finding something better. Many addicts are addicts cause they are lacking something in life.
There was a time I played video games 12 or more hours a day for months. Now, I spend the same time reading papers and programming and helping people learn programming and hanging out with friends and so on. Trying to stop never worked; filling my life with something more meaningful made it easy.
I've stopped cooking for myself because TV dinners are so easy. But most TV dinners aren't great. But because they're so convenient, they have killed my desire to cook. And yet I see no solution to this problem."
John Mayer speaking at Berklee College of Music had this to say on the subject:
> “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”
How hard can it be not to tweet?? I came here just to say this, and saw that many others had just said the same thing, and yet I felt the urge to say it again, myself! O, irony!
Seriously though, Twitter isn't like TV or smoking. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substance there is; TV isn't really addictive, in a medical/chemical sense, but it's so easy -- you sit on the couch and you get distracted by funny/mildly interesting things with sound and images.
But Twitter? You have to make a conscious decision to tweet, it's not a default like TV... Reading tweets is boring, writing tweets is work... How can it be difficult to not do it?
Well, they appear to be. I don't have a TV myself, but in many homes when there's a TV, it seems to be on all the time. Sometimes people mute it to eat lunch or dinner, without even turning it off...
The solution is to not solely crave affirmation from others. Be comfortable with yourself, and try to live a life that enriches yourself, and those around you. If the parts of that that you share happen to enrich those you come in contact with, great ... but the internet-celebrity that Twitter and other social-platforms encourages (how many followers, how many retweets, how many favorites, how many likes, etc.) is fleeting at-best.
Readit News
That, as I see it, is the problem – not twitter or 140char limits or any of the other stuff Dustin raises, it's the desire for external validation (and I can't help but imagine him furiously clicking reload on his own blog post to see how fast his Kudos score is climbing…)
My takeaway/advice is - try to recognise when you're being manipulated by gamification techniques and choose to be aware of them and ignore/resist them when it's in your better interest.
Does anybody _really_ think Picasso would have painted iPad trifles for immediate social media validation, instead of starting and completeing Garçon à la pipe? I _seriously_ doubt that - from Wikipedia: "At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works."
Picasso _didn't_ paint for the twitterati - he painted for Picasso. Dustin should write for Dustin - not for Twitter. He's allowing himself to become distracted from achieving what he wants at achieve. That's not Twitters fault. Procrastinators gonna procrastinate (he said hypocritically while wasting time on HN…)
e.g., if I actually got 5 upvotes on a HN comment, but HN showed it to me as 54, and then 78 and then 104 on subsequent comments, would I be more likely to contribute more? As a new user, would I be drawn in deeper?
It wouldn't work too well with public validation like Twitter, but it could for something like HN (and /. from memory) where the upvote count is now hidden.
I think you can't see it on other people's comments because this forces you to up vote something only if YOU like it and not based on what other users think. Eg on FB, a lot of people "like" stuff just because it already has a lot of likes (the need to conform)
http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone
My experience is that writing long, insightful pieces of prose is just hard, miserable work. People do it because they feel compelled to, not because it's a fun way to relax. So it's easy to procrastinate or avoid it, especially if there aren't any external demands or deadlines to meet.
Is it a problem if they don't? There are now many, many insightful essays on the internet; one could spend a lifetime reading them and barely scratch the surface. If you were actually writing for the attention it gets you, rather than for the sake of the writing (and the comment about favourite or retweet makes me think that's his real motivation here), and then you find a more efficient way to get that validation, isn't that a good thing? The internet won't miss what you didn't write.
But I'm willing to believe I'm an outlier in this regard.
Amazing that this author is so upset about what this random website has done to his life. I have no idea how he could have found enough value in it to have integrated it into his life so deeply. Nor can I understand why he would continue using it if it made him unhappy.
In short, seven years later, I still don't get what Twitter is for or why anybody would use it.
A silicon valley webapp used by somalian terrorists. The modern, "connected" world is weird sometimes.
To answer your question, and although I don't use it myself, some of my friends tell me they use it a bit like IRC: when you want to discuss of a particular topic, instead of joining a particular channel you ask your question with a specific hashtag (hey, IRC channel names are hashtags after all!) and it starts a discussion. It's like a more fluid IRC where chatrooms are created, deleted, merge and fork all the time. It sound good in principle, but I like the open and distributed IRC more.
When I started out on it, I was a freelancer. It was a great way to chat about work and trivia to other people doing similar jobs, whether I had met them or not - a sort of online "water-cooler" I guess or a more visible IRC. In fact, I remember describing how to use it as "sign up, follow interesting people, talk to strangers".
But now it's much less about the conversations (I only really converse with the people I know in real-life, so it becomes a sort of public text-messaging). Instead, it's become a broadcast medium - communication is much more one-way and because of that, the number of retweets you get for your "pithy insight" becomes all the more important.
I know many people that use Facebook (including myself). It's a website that almost freaking everybody is on; it's used for sharing stuff from daily lives, instant messaging, organizing social events.
I have no idea what Twitter is for.
In fact, we sat around a table earlier this year and were chatting about a piece of news that mentioned some exclusive content via Facebook, and realised that none of us had access. And that was fine by us, we don't really get what Facebook is for, and we just went back to talking and continued some of the conversations next day on Twitter.
I also have a band which has a Twitter account which is used to keep people up to date as mentioned above, and I have a music blog twitter account which I use to review gigs etc...
I have a pretty good Metal Twitter list here if anyone is interested: https://twitter.com/ColinHugh/lists/metal-news
The consequence is that after seven years Tweeter simply ignored by half of the IT population.
Deleted Comment
Targeted ephemeral public communication and sharing.
Effectively, nothing else does this and keeps it concise. Brevity is the soul of wit.
(When writing comments like these I always think of this article: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention... . Sorry if I've done that.)
Dustin's problem is similar in some respects to an addiction (which he alludes to), so perhaps the solution is treating it as such; forcing moderation on himself, or even complete detachment (the cold turkey approach). Of course, being involved in technology means Dustin is essentially an alcoholic working at a brewery, so disengagement may be especially difficult. But to throw up your hands and claim there's no way out strikes me as a bit defeatist. If you feel a technology is negatively impacting your thought patterns, perhaps you could find a way to use that technology less.
The issue I see with this is that it takes the way we use technology for granted. It's just like saying "that stuff is here to stay, learn to deal with it".
Which it is true in practice, but doesn't have to be true necessarily.
We could have opted as a society to not tolerate those kind of addictive (and mind-crushing) applications of technology, instead of celebrating them.
(The same way we have done with smoking, not just the banning in public places, but the whole attitude towards it).
(Also, where do you stop with your "addictive and mind crushing" barrier? Other forums, like HN? Video games? Fiction books? Theatre? "Thought-negating" music?)
There was a time I played video games 12 or more hours a day for months. Now, I spend the same time reading papers and programming and helping people learn programming and hanging out with friends and so on. Trying to stop never worked; filling my life with something more meaningful made it easy.
Keep looking.
> “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”
http://www.berklee-blogs.com/2011/07/john-mayer-2011-clinic-...
How hard can it be not to tweet?? I came here just to say this, and saw that many others had just said the same thing, and yet I felt the urge to say it again, myself! O, irony!
Seriously though, Twitter isn't like TV or smoking. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substance there is; TV isn't really addictive, in a medical/chemical sense, but it's so easy -- you sit on the couch and you get distracted by funny/mildly interesting things with sound and images.
But Twitter? You have to make a conscious decision to tweet, it's not a default like TV... Reading tweets is boring, writing tweets is work... How can it be difficult to not do it?
I guess I just don't get it.
Deleted Comment
The solution is to not solely crave affirmation from others. Be comfortable with yourself, and try to live a life that enriches yourself, and those around you. If the parts of that that you share happen to enrich those you come in contact with, great ... but the internet-celebrity that Twitter and other social-platforms encourages (how many followers, how many retweets, how many favorites, how many likes, etc.) is fleeting at-best.