Why I can’t have conversations using Twitter (2014)(antirez.com) |
Why I can’t have conversations using Twitter (2014)(antirez.com) |
This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!)
So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right?
But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising.
I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.
I think we might see "Twitter as an Agent of Change" from a future historian. If we have future historians.
Oh, here it is, from 2013: https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent...
Eisenstein:
Book 1979: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-...
Preliminary article, 1968: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720
Bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein
Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstei...
i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?
Politics and companies go where the most people are and use that platform to the best of their own interests. If they don't have the knack for long analytical articles or short witty comments, they just hire people who do.
But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter.
As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election.
Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.
This is what we're doing with Lyra (www.hellolyra.com): using a respect for language and cognitive load to create an open, sensible conversation platform.
There were other platforms that opted for a longer format. Yet Twitter became popular.
Perhaps the reality is that, had Twitter opted for a longer format, another platform would have taken its place.
Twitter may not be the cause of societal aversion to meaningful, dense discourse, but a symptom.
We actually have a case to compare to due to the curiosity of language: Japanese twitter. They can fit much longer ideas in 140 characters. It is a much saner place, and there is no shorter service leeching users.
It's far more likely that what keeps Twitter going is the social network of the existing user base and the vendor lock in of its APIs.
Other people are pointing out that soundbites existed before Twitter, but it opened up the ranks of the public babblerati to everyone, and promoted it as a platform for public discussion.
I dropped Twitter years ago, subscribed to a collection of newsletters to fill the gap in technical discussion, and honestly, I think I'm actually more informed for it.
But as you say the traditional media do this too - and have been just as instrumental in the rise of Trump. The "false equivalence" media structure, and the direct promotion of right-wing editorial through Murdoch news properties, are also extremely important.
Wanna bring my blood to a quick boil? Have a news program that pulls content from Twitter. And usually completely unvetted. Who needs legit sources?
It this regard, Twitter is an idea shit show. You can find just about anything said about anything there. So to pull more or less randomly is, to me, unimaginable and too often inappropriate and upsetting.
My point is, I think the tendency for sound-bite intelligence (hold the applause, you heard it here first. Lol) was already there. I mean, Orwell gets at it in directly in 1984. Also, given the number of non Twitter users, I think this also helps explain why the whole culture shifted. Sure, there are Twitter users with offline influence but that many? I think not.
In any case, to blame Twitter is meta. It's a symptom of the problem itself. That is, less thinking and more simplification is the sign of the times.
This is actually not true. Many of Trump's claims are challenged on Twitter and outside of Twitter. Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses
Much of the time, when a tweet says that it's 'in reply to' someone else, the specific tweet it was meant as a reply to is not displayed to third parties.
If you extend this experience to the Trump scenario, it's a total fantasy to think his followers on Twitter are being exposed to rebuttals of his statements.
You see counter-opinions if you follow the person who expresses them. It's the inverse of discourse, and I agree it's cancerous to civil society.
It's telling that you chose to twist the original poster's words to suit your narrative with the least fair interpretation. Unchallenged doesn't mean that something gets edited to bits. Traditionally it just meant that, for example, a reporter would ask followup questions to expand an idea or attempt to get the subject to explain things they'd prefer not to discuss (e.g. “How will we pay for that?”), or that controversial claims would be presented with a response from a relevant expert.
Trump is obviously unwilling to submit his ideas to critical review (or even basic editing) and in that sense Twitter is perfect for him. He can hit send and millions of his followers read it without any barrier where someone says “uh, doesn't that contradict what you said last week?”.
This is a stupid attitude. This should not even need elaborating. There are always more facts pertinent to the situation than any one of us can process. We will almost never have the correct background to correctly understand and interpret the facts.
Some people voted for Trump because he "tell's it as it is" when he has been lying demonstrably over and over.
I would rather have a journalist (or five) report to me what Trump said, together with context that makes it meaningful, and pointing out when he is lying. For the same time invested that will give me a vastly superior understanding of the situation than reading him directly.
I'm sure we'll figure out how to have a meaningful public discourse within the context of the Internet eventually, but as it was when other technologies came about, those who are fundamentally interested in _not_ having a reasonable discourse that is listened too, but want to get their superficially plausible demagoguery heard are having their field day right now.
Facebook is, in my mind, much more culpable, being at the point of the spear for the radicalization of last mile news delivery.
But does this impact his tweets?
More importantly, I do not think Twitter is a good platform to present a statement /together/ with its challenges.
(I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)
Now the left is blaming social media for the election of trump and damaging western civilization.
> But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables.
Were you complaining about twitter when obama used it well to push his agenda?
> He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate.
You mean people have direct access to what the leader thinks? Is that so terrible? Do you really prefer a system when a handful of like-minded editors in media companies frame everything to their agenda?
> I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.
Because free speech is such a horrific thing when you don't get your way?
I now follow over 900 people, and my Twitter feed is news I care about, opinions I care about, and great "cryptic punchlines" as you call them.
This is also what makes "social networks" so frustrating to technical people: it's not about your idea or even its execution. Rather, it's about how many other apes you've groomed in the past, to the point they'll back you up ("retweet") no matter how stupid your argument or insipid your tweet. The politics of it, tribalism.
A 140 character limit doesn't help of course :-) but the need for soundbites, a shared communication channel for quickly correcting/reinforcing our perception of reality, goes much deeper than that. Twitter is just a medium.
Where it gets interesting is when you consider why human group-think and "shared" perception of reality has been so successful, in evolutionary terms. Why are apes not simply rational animals, instead of spending so much energy forever climbing social ladders and adoring celebrities? Why these complex super-human social hierarchies (religions included), what makes them so efficient?
Social media is designed for friends, not technical discussion, it's just that human relationships of all kinds are messy and there are no clear lines. So one bleeds over into the other, this can be expected. I don't think that's social media's fault or the people, just a predictable consequence of "how the people be"
But it's also a result of the reactionary culture of those sites. People want to be offended. They think that because the comment is on the internet, that it's final, and intended as is. But it rarely is.
* Weak egos on part of the listener. They want to _take down_ or show their superiority by besting a famous or popular person.
* Over Criticality. Instead of waiting for the entire argument to jell, and trying to charitably [1] understand the persons argument, you find the first perceived hole and attack. Often arguing about things that aren't germane to the discussion.
* False Drama / Celebrity Association. This is the bullshitter who wants to be "involved in the argument" but doesn't really care about the argument or the outcome.
People forget that debate, as practiced in meat space is about winning, not using logic to present cogent arguments. So when Antriez gets beaten on Twitter, he losing the debate due other's rhetorical skill. Your mom.
I don't think that's exactly the situation Antirez describes. The way I see it, he's saying that Twitter makes it too easy for people to inadvertently pick isolated tweets out of context, mistakenly thinking they are seeing the whole context (because tracking down the full discussion on Twitter is very cumbersome and time-consuming), and then reply to something different than what was actually argued in the broader context.
That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one.
As much as I want to believe that, it has not been my experience. I've found that if there's a possible way to misinterpret a statement, somebody on the internet will misinterpret it. They don't do it on purpose to win an argument most of the time, either. It happens everywhere on the internet (HN, Reddit, twitter, even blog comment sections) because communication is difficult and internet increases the exposed surface area of a statement. The more people to read a thing, the more likely it is somebody will interpret something that wasn't intended.
The painful truth is that many people realize this but they agonize over the fact that the people they want to talk with can only be found on Twitter. Network effect + tribalism = today's sad reality.
It's hilarious to me that a rule enforced by external technical reasons (length of SMS) has become so important to the product that it's non negotiable.
Why can't I even, for example, add a text "attachment" the same way I attach photo, video, links, etc.? There's something hilarious about the CEO of Twitter screenshotting the "notes" app on his iPhone in order to send a message.
e.g. I tweet something positive in the 140 characters, and in the attachment I have something offensive. It's similar to the editing tweet problem.
There was some press about expanding the limit https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering...
But, also arguing with people on twitter. That's bad, too. Let's just go with that.
Best I can think of right now is "fremdschämen", which literally translates into "foreign shame".
It means to be ashamed or embarrassed for other people's behaviour (as opposed to your own).
Looking at the Twitter design, this seems to be the intended use. At least in my stream almost all tweets are accompanied by a large picture. Quite often something that is not even very relevant, since they are auto picking the pictures for linked web sites. This makes very poor use of screen real estate. If conversations were a thing for them, I would expect a different design.
It also fascinates me how badly editors' choice of headlines to make people more likely to click can screw up the debate because many people respond to the clickbait headline without clicking, and end up drawing conclusions that aren't at all supported by the article. Presumably this is also a problem on facebook, but I deleted my account there some time ago.
To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what insight I would gain in this specific case from reading anything other that a) your post on diskless replication, b) the Stripe engineers' report, and maybe c) a few of the paragraphs of your response in this post.
Have a look at Lyra - it's a nonprofit conversation service designed with respect for language and attention.
www.hellolyra.com
Twitter seems to support less of a netiquette, it's more point-and-shoot. Besides that, it seems intuitive that the 140 chars restriction lends itself less to discussions than proper forums.
I met a bunch of people hating on React and a bunch of people loving it.
No value in these tweets.
I told someone we were looking at it and I too got a similar response.
I think that is something to doubt; IRC was made for discussion and even long winded discussion. That would not work for Trump as far as I can see. The format of Twitter makes discussion hard / impossible. To really create proper reasoning, you need to link a blogpost and most people simply will not click on it.
Look at the three tweets Antirez mentions. The second one starts
"the 99% percentile is bad [...]"
Antirez mentions someone took this to literally mean that percentiles are a bad metric. To me, this doesn't particularly require bad faith or malicious cherry-picking; it just requires a bit of carelessness, enabled by the lack of context and no indication this was part #2 of a 3-long series of tweets. And apparently, once the "rebuttals" start piling up, they generate a snowball effect. Not entirely Twitter's fault, but definitely made worse by it, which is what (I think) Antirez is arguing:
> "Once upon a time, people used to argue for days on usenet, but at least there was, most of the times, an argument against a new argument and so forth, with enough text and context to have a normal condition. This instead is just amplification of hate and engineering rules 101 together."
In other worse, it's less that twitter influenced society, and more that society was waiting for the medium to communicate the way it wants.
Society definitely responds to media influence. Sadly this is exploited in the wrong direction and rarely if ever for the society's benefit (mostly education).
You could say that, since it appears Twitter is now the primary platform for broadcasting outside of film/tv.
But is Twitter even making money yet? How sad and dumb would it be that Twitter had to shut down in a couple years?