YMMV, but I am hopeful that blue sky is going to keep improving and its culture of easy muting keywords will prevent the mass reach of trolls that are toxic to the community.
For me, I'll leave it. My takeaway: Twitter is indeed the worst global social network - of all time // AND, there are many others that are much better - factually so.
For those who still wish to engage with the service but not feed the beast, remove your tweets and your account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159073
> Twitter is irreplaceable
The main problem is the author overlooked the distinction between Twitter as a concept for "a communication media channel open to everyone" and specifically Twitter itself.
I can generally agree with the idea of wanting some information source other than "centralized media". I think it is a good thing to want. But there's quite a leap from there to thinking Twitter is so unique in this and so irreplaceable. As if there weren't others before, or after, or currently. As if there was something particular to Twitter.
When you see a photo of Mike Brown's body laying in the street hours after he had been shot with his hands (allegedly) raised I reckon that you may form a lasting impression about the relationship between Black and Blue that will persist long after the official narrative is distributed.
I think people who have experienced this are exhausted. This sort of information exchange that is very serious and very real and very human cannot coexist where information that is not like that is also exchanged (but I may be digressing...).
The Powers That Be™ benefitted by both allowing them to become exhausted and by poisoning the well and making sure that the free discourse is as unsatisfying as possible and later platforms are echo chambers where the people most likely to congregate on platforms of outside importance can be satisfied by their shared dissatisfaction.
And all the cooks in the kitchen exist with the diners of their respective persuasions to cook and serve a meal some say is to die for.
Why? Because they got their information from TV and newspapers like everyone else. And what they read was that RPGs were satanic rituals and that "playing RPGs" meant murdering people.
I think it's a bit shallow for the author to blame everything on the media without even mentioning the extremely conservative Catholic church or how Spain was a full on dictatorship until Franco died in 1975. Likewise his prescription to just ignore the trolls ignores a lot of solid research on information warfare, tipping points and the like; the idea of 'Gresham's law of content', where bad drives out good once it rises above a certain portion of the total, has been around a good 15 years.
In the end it feels as if the author is projecting personal feelings onto a preferred platform and declaring an individual expression of demand to be an objective inelasticity. In reality networks cleave all the time, and indeed do in rather predictable ways that can be derived from the pattern of follows or interaction without even paying much attention to the content.
My circle of close friends is small, quality over quantity and such.
My main issue with Twitter is its lack of tools to quickly customize or filter your experience. This limitation can pull users into a world of hate, almost like being drawn into a black hole. I’m not sure if this is intentional or something that will improve in the short term. I don’t use Mastodon often, but I’ve noticed constructive discussions happening there. Similarly, I think Reddit has been an incredible resource—one that its owners and managers often seem not to fully understand.
For someone that writes a lot about existing social media formats, it's amazing how they could come to such a wrong conclusion that invalidates anything else they might say. Twitter will die, the same way that MySpace died or LiveJournal died or any other popular social media platform dies. It breaches the trust thermocline and a mass amount of users leave, never to return.
Here's the FAQ entry
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
What does [flagged] mean?
Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
A bit harsh maybe, but gotta agree to the rules to play the game :)
Being social and accepted comes with their own compromises because of the dynamics happening around them, some are of which try to use them as tools.
Well put.
It is refreshing to see someone make a statement and then proceed to ramble about completely unrelated things with no intent of even revisiting the original thesis let alone defending or explaining it. I haven’t read anything this meandering and empty since I stopped using Twitter
3,000 reports per hour now, contrast that to 340,000 for entire previois year (or 38 report/hr).
“But on Twitter, you can read:
Experts Who are independent Recounting events they are experiencing first hand And, on the same Twitter, you can find their opponents:
Disproving or debating them With community notes which are displayed at the same level as the OP Which rely on third party sources This only happens on Twitter. And it infuriates traditional media, because they lose control of the narrative”
I think about wholly different Twitter experiences when I think of Twitter (X) in it’s current state, maybe 2018-ish twitter had the features mentioned but nowadays it’s;
- interaction bait - ragebait (which partly overlaps with interaction bait) - misinformation - the owner throwing a hissy fit over almost nothing - the owner roleplaying as his 3 year old son (this isn’t one you see often but it’s memorable)
Sure buddy
The article clearly follows a course that outlines the process behind the author's beliefs. He says that he intends to share his argument against the alternatives later...So consider this the first part of what may became a greater work.
I disagree with him, although I don't discount all of his observations. But it's clear that he's put some effort into the article which is ostensibly meant to be continued.
I like the idea that the existence of one article necessarily implies the existence of a second article. Unless you think that is the case it appears as though the author finished
> Here's a twelve-act essay…
his “twelve-act essay” in this post.
It's refreshing to see a discussion on how different cultural approaches influence writing styles. I think this might partly stem from cultural differences. For example, in Latin-based cultures like Spain or France, it’s more common for authors to leave certain ideas implicit, expecting readers to infer connections or fill in gaps. This can sometimes come across as "rambling" or lacking focus, especially to readers from more fact-oriented cultures, like the American-centric style found here on HN.
In contrast, the American style tends to prioritize clarity, directness, and explicit connections between ideas. Without knowing the author’s background, it’s possible that what some perceive as a lack of explanation or defense in the original piece might simply reflect a different cultural approach to argumentation and storytelling. One that is less rigid but more open to interpretation, even if it invites criticism.
People from countries other than America can start with a thesis and then mention that thesis in the body of an essay.
Your original source saying it's because of "leftists" doesn't make me think that you have positive intentions, that's why I'm pushing back on this.
A real thesis requires much more skills and time that the ones you mention.
I apologize but I am getting a little bit of secondhand embarrassment from seeing someone look at objectively bad writing and saying “This is actually an example of the famously uniform culture of France and Spain” ???
As an aside, where did you develop the “cross-cultural skill” of haughty dismissiveness out-of-hand in response to gentle disagreement?