I quit Twitter about 6 months ago. It was eerily similar to quitting smoking (which I did a couple years ago). Honestly, that scared me straight. The fact that an app on my phone had similar addictive qualities to tobacco was alarming enough to keep me off. I still get the urge to log back in sometimes, but luckily I perma-nuked the account so I’d be starting from scratch, which is a large enough barrier to keep me from trying (for now).
For me, yes. My addiction on Twitter was centered around real-time news/events. HN doesn’t have that focus, so for me, it’s a lot easier to moderate time on HN. I love HN, and probably do spend too much time here, but at least I’m not pulling to refresh sorted by latest tweets for hours on end every time there’s a plane crash (literal or figurative).
I much rather prefer discussion on HN for the simple fact that it's anonymized. That makes it much easier for users to up/down vote comments and it just works better. It shows you what people really think. It also makes everything more equal because it doesn't matter who you are or how many followers you have.
Beware. One thing that happens to people in a homogeneous community is that the out-group shaming becomes invisible. So everyone in every little community thinks that their community is respectful, but the other communities are about hating.
Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.
That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)
My wife is a developer in the same company as mine (albeit in a totally different sub-orga). This is maybe the cause I don't share your experience (at all).
She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset.
She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch.
Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.
Slight non sequitur here but what you said about addictive qualities reminds me of a similar experience I had with a game a few years ago.
I've never been hooked on nicotine or similar, but toward the end of 2017 a game (Simcity Buildit) dug deeeeeeeeep into my soul and for the first time in my life I had to aggressively quit something like that cold turkey.
First I should say: It's a great game and really fun! (HA - I know I sound like a pusher...) I didn't spend any money on it. But man did I spend brain cycles and time on it. A few specific game dynamics really get their hooks into you - this concept of mini game-within-a-game "tournaments" which require your attention over a specific period of time (ahem weekends).
My "rock bottom" was two things: I was on a long drive from LA to SF and I had my girlfriend open up the app to complete a few time-sensitive tasks for me while I was driving. There I was explaining "ok now swipe this. Drag it there. Great. Now do the same on this other thing. Ok thanks love!".
The second was that a common strategy in the game where you start a second instance on a different device to mine certain resources (it was called a "feeder city"). So there I was on any given Friday night sitting on the couch with my iPhone AND iPad open, swiping away.
One day it struck me that there was no end to this cycle. There was no winning. There was just more building and more swiping and more hours to go down the drain, and I just realized I had to quit. So I hard-deleted the game from my phone and iPad right in the middle of a weekend mini-tournament and never looked back.
In the days following, I had very regular twitches and urges to go back. "Just one more"....I realized this was real addiction. Luckily it passed after a few days. But wow - what an eye-opener for me.
I'm a bit surprised a city builder is highly playable on mobile. I've played Cities Skylines on desktop (and versions of SimCity in the past). I can't imagine trying to build anything of scale on mobile in a city builder though. Is it primarily the mechanics, feedback systems, that are enjoyable, rather than the visual construction aspect?
I got hooked on this in December after getting an iPad. Trying to moderate my usage. It helps to realize that 1) it's supposed to be fun and 2) I'll never be the best. I'd imagine I'll get off it a bit more once the weather warms up.
It's really well-made. My biggest knock on it is that it's a typical "milk as much money as possible out of the user" game, so you never know which mechanics are truly random or which ones are set up to hack your psychology. Some of the nags/alerts wear on you. I also wish it was a bit more optimized for aesthetics (no diagonal roads!).
But the UX is extremely good. The visuals are nice. The contests and general gameplay goals are engaging and fun. It's 4X-like, with that "one more turn" vibe and the need to balance multiple goals.
I think the calculated dynamics bit got to me as well - I’m almost certain (esp. from reading others’ experiences) that items that you need show up less frequently in the marketplace when you need them. So those nails that were so easy to find 10 minutes ago are suddenly super scarce when you’ve got some buildings that actually need them.
So you think “oh I just saw those!” And keep spinning the slot machine wheels of the marketplace. And then when they DO finally appear, that little dopamine hit is all the sweeter :)
> show up less frequently in the marketplace when you need them
I see this alleged all the time, but a part of me is convinced that it's a trick of the mind. But I don't know, and that's what's frustrating. Even if they don't pull the rug out from you, they could do so at any time and I'd never know it. Not great!
These are all great points. I recently quit too. It was mostly because like this post, I found someone I really respected and it turned out he was a raging bigot against people like me.
If as many people quit twitter as talk about it, the company would be bankrupt. There are a lot of people “sneaking a smoke” on twitter when the kids are at school.
Yep. A lot of people "quit" these nasty centralized you-as-a-product services but what they mean by quit is that they don't use their account anymore. They still use the services.
You should create a new blog category, containing only posts with titles up to 280 characters and just post the tidbits you'd otherwise post to Twitter. Styled accordingly.
If worthy enough, you could even share the link to any one of them on Twitter. ;)
For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really cool things about Twitter. I think there's something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later!
The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go.
I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.
Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That's the source of so much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it's also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!
Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public conversation."
God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever.
I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, really fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.
Toxicity on twitter is huge but once you unfollow toxic users (or any user who tweets nonsense too often) things look much better. Tbh I don't use twitter to engage in conversations. I use it mostly to consume interesting content.
Twitter could be doing so much more to fix this problem. It's abundantly clear that "hands off" moderation doesn't work. It doesn't work for Twitter, it doesn't work for Facebook, it doesn't work for any shared social space online or offline.
While I absolutely agree with this, and think Twitter does things that make it worse: no automated (or human-driven in bulk) abuse-detector will ever work perfectly. People are creative. Some amount of manual blocking is a reasonable expectation... just not as much as is necessary now :)
Twitter's algorithm has a way of showing most toxic or controversial posts and comments first.
There are people that are very good friends of mine in Real Life, but their Twitter profiles show a completely toxic persona. This doesn't happen with their other social media profiles.
TikTok on the other hand shows up higher more "feel-good" content which is why it's the only social media app I have installed on my phone.
I wouldn't be able to replicate your experience. My friends on twitter are either sidelining toxicity (by simply ignoring the usual in/outgroup messaging) or by just posting their (non-political, non-controversial, technical) stuff.
I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on other social networks.
Yeah if you aggressively block, unfollow, and curate Twitter can be really great.
I think it's super cool to be able to interact with different people doing interesting things (a little like HN, but it's easier to remember who the people are where as on HN I never remember 99% of the usernames in threads).
The problem I found with blocking and muting people is that twitter continues to show tweets from people I don’t follow - entirely in the hope of engaging me of course, which most of the time means trying to pull me into an argument.
Sometimes it introduces you to new people though that are interesting to follow (usually because people in your network liked their post or something). I find this generally valuable.
If you want to be extreme about it, you can put everyone in lists and then this won't happen. You can also use a third party client that doesn't do this.
My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many and they suck. I'd much rather have Twitter premium that removes the ads.
When I was on Twitter I found the ads so distracting that I used the web version on my phone with Firefox and ublock origin. This did the job, just about if you can cope with the web client clumsiness and lag.
That's quite surprising; I've found the ads to be fairly unobtrusive compared to almost any other website. I would prefer there to be a text only mode though - every so often, the ad repaint will cause the UI to "jump".
I am, and it shows me tweets from people I don't follow. It cleverly uses the mechanism of "retweets" to show me them. It's only when you realise that _twitter only shows you selected retweets_ that you see the notion of retweeting is an excuse to show you tweets from people you don't follow.
I think its inherent to the setup of the ecosphere and has similarities to high school politics of everyone desperately trying to get noticed that can lead to bullying.
To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this tends towards hostility and partisanship.
Similar. Recently I’ve also started using twitter only on weekends, to minimise distraction and ensure it’s more consumption based (who in twitter has the patience to wait 5 days for a reply?!).
Observations: I know longer expend energy thinking about the terrible state of discourse on twitter, the sanctimony, bad faith, etc. Also, my thought patterns seem to be changing, my brain feels like it has “spare capacity” and I find myself starting new hobbies. Just anecdata, but I am certain I am calmer and less worried about twitter destroying humanity!
Same here. My overall Twitter experience is great! Every time I had a bad experience, it was something I could have easily avoided by just not joining a conversation that I kind of knew was going to be a flame war.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who behave really well and have really interesting things to say about tech, but for anything political, they just vent really hateful, angry things (or retweet the same). The Go community has a fair amount of this, sadly. It sucks to have to choose, but more importantly I think Twitter actually radicalizes people toward hate and divisiveness. I don't think these people were so hateful or angry ~7 years ago. When I look at the curated news section, it seems purpose-built to make me mad, with the dumbest, most toxic comments at the top.
I honestly think Twitter has managed to rewire our brains, with people being shocked/offended by things that 7 years ago wouldn't have turned heads. Twitter has recognised this, and feeds this effect to increase engagement. Also see Facebook.
I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.
Something about all your expressions, questions, and silences being visible to everyone else, all the time.
You can see everyone else is constantly tweeting about how awful the Capulets are - your friends mostly aren't, but they're retweeting people who are. You remember one time you expressed some doubts about something the Montagues did and people you don't know turned up to tell you off. You think the Capulets might actually be right about something this one time, but you don't dare say it.
Private conversations give you more room to be wrong, to be uncertain, to be curious, to be uninterested. On Twitter you always have an audience.
This is what finally pushed me off of Twitter. I just wish I had the ability to filter posts based on whether the user is qualified to have an opinion on the topic. I don't want opinions on technology from members of congress, and I don't want political rants from tech experts.
Somehow I managed to swim only good parts of twitter. It was full of smart creative people doing only peaceful things. A few thin feud here and there but nothing crazy.
Not to pick on it but compared to curated reddit / twitter, I found it very hard to find anything interesting on discord I kept jumping from server to server.
This SMBC was written in 2013, and I still think it's the most accurate simplified explanation of how social media on the internet tends to work I've come across:
Yep. Related is what SlateStarCodex called the "weak man" argument.
Basically, you make a strawman argument: rather than arguing whatever point your opponent was claiming, you make something up and argue against that instead.
But since you're arguing on the internet, you can always find some dipshit somewhere who actually supports the insane thing you made up. So you turn to your opponent and say "look at what your side believes!"
Aren't we now seeing a reaction to this with the cancel culture? Getting rid of the assholes as vehemently as possible?
Even though cancel culture is probably overreacting, I'm not sure if there is another way than to get rid of the toxic loud minority.
I'm a mod in a subreddit that has a very toxic circle jerk sister subreddit. Like "jokes about the recently died father of one of the persons the main subreddit is about" bad. Some people frequent both subreddits and while they are just behaved enough to not be straight banned in the main subreddit, their behavior in the circle jerk would well justify a perma bann.
In my experience there is no reasoning with certain persons. Even if they seem reasonable 80% of the time, the 20% completely destroy any basis for normal discussions. There's a latent sentiment that creeps into every discussion if you don't remove these persons. Even if they haven't shown their bad side in the main subreddit.
The problem with mass banning on a large scale driven by whoever is loudest is that it very, very quickly devolves into witch hunts. Nobody wins.
I used to run my own BBS back in the dialup days. Even then, the problems would be recognisable to a modern forum mod.
The only workable solutions I've found are that the more focused a board on a select number of topics, the easier it is to effectively moderate in a humane manner, and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success. In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.
> The only workable solutions I've found are that the more focused a board on a select number of topics, the easier it is to effectively moderate in a humane manner,
In my special case, we have a very heterogeneous audience because we are not mono thematical. It is quite problematic if you have people coming together who have widely different expectations.
> and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success.
I agree. Never do this. The rules will always be used against you, regardless of how detailed they are. And discussions about rules take up so much time. Keep them short and concise but also make clear that they are not set in stone. You will need leeway anyway.
> In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.
The "significant brain-time" is a problem. You are outnumbered and then fighthing and debunking bullshit takes much more time than producing it (the Trump tactic).
For my case, I came to the conclusion that being nice 80% of the time is good enough. Save the 20% evilness for the notorious cases and you can cut down a lot of mod time. Educating newbies is a different matter but for regulars, I started to warn them one time and afterwards I start temporarily banning in a fibonacci like manner for every subsequent temporary bann. Most get it then or even leave before I have to perma-bann them.
One of the cooler exp in my career was Theodore Ts'o responding to a (in retrospect dumb) query about some latency issues we were witnessing with fsync. I feel like twitter enables more of those interactions
This was possible before Twitter. I remember back in the phpBB days, I was in a group where people were discussing the work of the philosopher Daniel Dennett and I had just read his book and didn't think people were reading him correctly. Instead of immediately taking to the "submit" button to tell them what I thought, I just emailed Daniel Dennett and asked him. He was head of the Tufts University Cognitive Science center and his email was publicly listed. He answered pretty quickly.
I wonder if he still would or if the amount of spam hitting public figures from every direction is so overwhelming that they can't possibly respond to it all. And I wonder how much of the "responses" you get from blue checks on Twitter is really them and how much is a hired social media manager running their account.
I pretty much entirely agree with the author. I've never derived value from Twitter, try as I might. I think some personalities are better suited to the decentralized, broadcast-and-hope, follow-the-experts, ratings-driven content.
I get a lot more value out of forums about a topic, or HN, or groups of friends I already know. Facebook groups on my hobbies, etc. Joining/participating in "private" (but open to anyone) groups rather than broadcasting outwards to all and getting engagement through shock/clickbait type content.
That doesn't mean what works for me has to work for you, though, and of course it's without getting into how problematic one platform's LEADERSHIP might be versus another.
It's a huge difference for me though. Most of the items here are quite interesting to me and not all critics are stomped into the ground relentlessly. It looks like there is some strange level of respect.
I have written mistakes and apologized for them. It seems most of you accept that. Or maybe it's so heavily moderated i only see the stuff i'm allowed to see. I don't know.
I've tried Twitter a few days and decided it's not for me. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, forums, irc, etc. Some parts of them are quite useful, but for the most they are a very stressful environment to participate in.
Even if you have followers, if your individual tweets don't engage well, Twitter won't show them to 100% of the people who explicitly follow you, thanks to their algorithms. YouTube is the same way, which is why you see channels telling users to do three clicks to actually follow: subscribe, notifications on, notifications set to "all".
They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content is clickbaity enough and benefits the platform's own advertising metrics. You can only ever be a sharecropper on censorship platforms, no matter how successful you become.
I had >20k followers after more than a decade on Twitter, and I deleted. Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send.
I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?
Yes. YouTube deserves a little bit of credit for preserving a chronological view, but this is perhaps cancelled out by their draconian restrictions on what you are allowed to publish.
What you describe in the first paragraph is not censorship.
There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship."
Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing for engagement and advertising is not like a government deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader.
It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf space, or build enough demand for your product that the store decides it can make more money giving you better positioning.
Twitter also moderates content in a way that has nothing to do with engagement and making them money. But if you give someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they feel like monetizing that content.
Censorship is maybe the wrong word, but we all understood what he meant and agree that this behavior wrong.
Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while that's not actually the case.
It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move, and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be considered as broken.
We don't get to declare what Twitter is or isn't. It has evolved over time from a kind of microblogging platform into an algorithmic-timeline social network.
As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it, it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out.
The thing we have to understand is that we who want a microblogging platform aren't their market. They're not interested in people with 500-5,000 followers using Twitter to publish things that every one of their followers will see.
Likewise, they're not interested in people who want to just follow certain people and see 100% of their tweets. That's not their business model. Do I like that? No. But I'm not their customer, I'm the product they sell to their customers.
———
One thing I find very interesting about discussions like this is how closely they resemble discussions from the 1970s and 1980s about what computers were for. It seems quaint now, but people once said computers were for business, not games.
Then a younger generation came along and when all the old fogies died off or retired, gaming became a gajillion-dollar industry.
Now we get pronouncements like "That's not what Twitter's for." Obviously it is what Twitter's for, because millions of people are using it that way and are "Happy as Larry," oblivious to the fact that it used to be a microblogging platform, and if we ask 100 randomly chosen Twitter employees, exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective and they're working hard to restore its value as a way to subscribe to everything people tweet.
I kind of feel like those of us who miss its microblogging origin are metaphorically members of an older generation than those who are happily Tweeting, TikToking, SnapChatting, &c.
The concept of following still (at least to me) implies seeing all the content said person is posting. Twitter liberally uses the word "follow" but then doesn't deliver.
They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".
---
> are "Happy as Larry,"
Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?
> exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective
They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.
They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".
You have something there that applies to all of social media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok). Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting and what I'm missing.
The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a certain type of person, and you and I are probably those kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they ought to care.
Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can install, which apps appear on the front page of the app store, &c.
It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't like it will change their minds.
The fact that some people are blind to these issues doesn't mean we shouldn't be calling out unethical, malicious, misleading or defective behavior and/or software.
100% agree. It may be futile with the vast majority of their users, but every person who actually cares about it and becomes more informed though advocacy is a modest win of some kind.
Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?
This is a very interesting point, to which I will say that people who complain or praise any product are always the vocal minority.
As I alluded to in another reply, we regularly get impassioned posts and comments about what's wrong with iOS on HN, and yet we know for a fact that many, many, MANY people are happy with their iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches.
Most people are happy with censorship and a lack of freedom of speech, because most people have nothing to say, and a lack of such never affects them.
Most people are fine not having any privacy, because they believe that they have nothing to hide.
The danger comes from making it impossible to publish unpopular things or publish anonymously, or making privacy impossible. There is a percentage of people for whom these things are not only important but essential, and when we close off those options then we lose the important aspects of society facilitated by those people. Those aspects benefit everyone.
We should pay very close attention to the complaints of those people, even if (or perhaps especially because) they are a minority of users.
a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.
There's a phrase for this: "Defective by design." Meaning, what we the observer consider to be a harmful quality of the product is not an accident or oversight, but a deliberate choice.
I say similar things about Slack's iPad client. It's defective by design.
Likewise, web sites that choose not to be accessible are defective-by-design. If you ask their product manager, the response will be, "Accessibility is not a priority, and we can live with people who need accessible web sites doing business with someone else."
Of course, it's implicit in the phrase "defective by design" that this kind of defective is not exactly the same kind of "defective" as the product not doing the thing its creators designed it to do, or not doing the thing that their target market expect it to do.
I had a tiny amount of followers and quit. There's a very quiet voice in the back of my head that wonders what I would have done with something like 20k. You're the real deal.
>> Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send.
I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email) to your internet friends.
I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet your tweets and so their friends find you).
The vast majority of my email list is strangers who signed up on my website, after they got linked to something I wrote. That is to say, people don't sign up for my emails because of my emails, they sign up for my emails because of my website. I'm yet to actually send a single email, but I will probably start soon as I have some cool things to announce.
I got to 25% of my Twitter numbers (after 12 years on Twitter) within only a year or two of writing consistently on my own site. By those figures, I am discovered and followed more and faster on my own site than I ever was on Twitter.
Youtube should be for watching old footage of Lester Young from the 30s. Not everything exists to provide an alternative celebrity model for narcissists.
I used facebook for promoting local events but in the last ~5 years it was less and less effective for that.
Then I used it only for meme groups and getting angry at strangers.
Hard quit last summer and never looked back.
I think this is one of the bigger factors when people choose to quit social networks, even if they don't realize it explicitly. There's such a "hustle culture" to get likes and favorites that it really warps what you can post. You can't really be vulnerable on a social network because it either gets ignored or interpreted as another hustle ("You got this!!!") because the surrounding content from everyone else is "Look at how great I am!". YouTube creators have to explicitly say "Please like and subscribe!" but that's implicit and pervasive on Twitter and Facebook by their very nature.
I never really used it much, but sometimes there are really interesting threads or content on local events.
There also seems to be a massive amount of vile and rude commenters.
I am perfectly fine using Twitter by following carefully via lists only and not following anyone who regularly makes Twitter storms, not following any celebrities, very few journalists, no major publications/tv networks whatsoever
All wonderful points. I also stopped using Twitter a few months ago, not for me. I especially like the point about piquing interest on “who the dunkee” is — wow what a waste of time.
I've used Twitter for more than a decade. I check it maybe once a day, and when I do, I read maybe 10% of my timeline and move on to something more productive.
The biggest problem is viral misinformation combined with a focus on people that are "good with Twitter". Someone with a bunch of followers tweets something like "the sun rose in the north this morning" and if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you and all their tweets will be liked and retweeted.
The reason I used Twitter back in the day was to find out what was happening in the world and to interact with others. These days there are too many that think a big follower count means they can tweet stuff that's wrong.
Then there's the other stuff where you have to see someone called out for calling women brilliant (yep, happened today).
Try as I might, I can't return my timeline to what it was, and I can now go a week without looking at it and I don't miss anything.
> if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you
Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?
But I do want to thank you for a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads. Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect, and in most cases, it's made up so they can get likes and retweets. The post-truth world is alive and well. And, unfortunately, profitable for some.
To them, their timeline is "curated" to remove "toxic" elements, which makes their filter bubble more pleasant. Then they blame you, even in this very thread, for finding these interactions useless. That isn't misinformation, that is a point of view.
The biggest problem is that Twitter- and Mastodon-style blocking make it impossible to engage with people who need to be engaged with, regardless of why (whether informational or emotional).
Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to listen to random strangers who want to argue with you? Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard you, and then decided to come over and butt into the conversation? And when the stranger is told to go away, they complain "You're talking in a public place where people can hear you, what did you expect?" And somehow the stranger feels that they're wronged by that.
> Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.
The point is that in order to meet other people, you have to go out into the public. But that doesn't mean you want to meet with and talk with anyone and everyone out in the public. It's a terrible tradeoff if the only way you can get pleasant social interaction with others is to also suffer unpleasant social interaction with strangers who want to argue with you.
None of us designed Twitter. We have to take it as it is. Twitter is public, yes, but that's not an excuse for you personally to debate with every stranger you happen to disagree with. That's not on Twitter, that's on you.
> I still want to read what people like Patrick McKenzie, Zach Weinersmith, John Carmack and others have to say.
I quit twitter years ago for some of the same reasons mentioned in this blog post, and I 100% agree with this quote. I would love a way to get at the good content from twitter without all the constant rage.
Does anyone know a good tool or way to get a much more curated Twitter experience?
I just keep a markdown file with links to Twitter profiles from people I care about. Then I visit the links directly despite not having a Twitter profile, I get to read what they have to say. I also added the "Calm Twitter" plugin to my browser that strips out Trending stories, hides like counts, etc. It makes for a better, focused Twitter experience. I don't care about posting, so I get the info I want without needing to participate in the gamification.
Only if you tell it to. You can choose an algorithmic feed or a chronological feed. I don't know why anybody would choose the algorithmic feed, because you're right that it sucks, but there's also no pressure to do so.
As there's lots of confusion about this (I didn't downvote you btw) - it's untrue. First, it will switch you back to algorithmic feed at every opportunity. Second, it selectively show you likes and retweets from third parties you have nothing to do with. Third, it will show you topic based content (perhaps by remove all topics you can escape this, but it will try to add topics via dropping in links everywhere). Even if it just shows people you follow, you'll still end up seeing third party comments, and twitter will select those to engage/enrage you too.
Do you use Twitter much? Some of those were actual issues that arose when the algorithmic feed was first introduced, but none of that is the case anymore and hasn't been for at least at year and probably more. I can't remember the last time I was switched back to the algorithmic feed. The chronological feed categorically does not show you likes, and only shows retweets from people you follow. And the only replies that will appear on your timeline are when one person you follow replies to another person you follow.
yes, but only shows you _select_ retweets from people you follow. You don't control that. Anything in your timeline that is curated can be used to manipulate you. And those retweets and likes are enough. Just wait until you see a retweet or like and think "but that's wrong / I disagree / waat" and try to catch yourself - you've been shown it for a reason.
just came across an example. I saw a retweet and thought "that's self-evidently false", started looking at the replies, and then decided to mute the original author... turned out it was someone I had already unfollowed, because they were tweeting nonsense. And the curation algorithm had deliberately shown me the most provocative tweet it could find from a person I'd unfollowed... Twitter is an unethical outrage machine.
It's not. I don't have to rely on Twitter's algo to pump irrelevant crap, replies, etc. I don't have to scroll an infinite feed. I just check the influencers that I care about, to get whatever they posted that day. I don't need to see all the noise. It takes me 15-20 minutes a day to catch up and then I move on.
You don't have to do that anyway. Just set your feed to "latest" and there's no algorithm besides "when did this appear on the timeline of someone you follow?"
I don't want to keep a Twitter account. I don't want notifications when someone retweets or whatever. I just don't mess with it. I don't want the temptation to respond. I don't want some new feature from Twitter interrupting my flow. The point is to check on the people I care about hearing from and ignore all else. Anyways, you do you, this works for me.
There are tools that produce an RSS feed from Twitter feeds, so you can subscribe to them via RSS. This gives you their tweets (in a chronological feed - what an achievement) while hiding any of the noise such as like/retweet counts and other crap Twitter puts in there to increase engagement. You also don't need an account so you wouldn't be tempted to participate in any toxic conversations.
What works best for me is using a third-party client like Tweetbot. It has no algorithmic timeline at all. Just follow the McKenzies, Weinersmiths and Carmacks of the world, and that's all you will see.
Edit: The other big thing for me is just unfollowing/blocking people who post garbage, with no remorse. It doesn't matter if your feed is 95% gold, the 5% that isn't makes you not worth it.
After I quit Twitter a few months ago, I set up a private instance of Nitter[0], and use Huginn[1] to forward posts from it to an instance of Pleroma[2].
Which reminds me, I need to clean up and publish my Huginn agent for posting to Mastodon/Pleroma. :)
(Nitter supports RSS, so you could probably use a regular RSS reader instead of Huginn/Pleroma. But I also configured some other, non-RSS, content in my feed.)
I've been on Twitter for several years now, but not posted much. I used to find it interesting because there was a lot of good technical articles and information being shared by the people I chose to follow. Then over time that mostly stopped, but it was still good because I followed people who posted the kind of dumb jokes I like.
And then I felt increasingly disconnected from everyone because of being stuck at home in a pandemic. And I started tweeting a little more, and getting pretty much nothing back. And then I had a bad interaction (nothing abusive, just confrontational), and I uninstalled the app from my phone.
I basically agree with everything in TFA. There is fun, interesting and sometimes even insightful stuff on Twitter. But people become warped. It's incredibly difficult to actually have a two-way communication on Twitter; people will misinterpret and assume the worst about everything you write.
And I was not immune to this effect either - I realised when I went back over the back-and-forth that had felt so emotionally charged at the time, that I had also been assuming the worst and replying without the open mind that might have led to a better interaction.
Twitter is the best place to reach some of the top people in tech (in the big data niche at least). It's a great place to market projects, get a following, and find open source collaborators.
It can also be a toxic place that puts you in a bad head space and wastes time. A ticking time bomb that can blow up your productivity at any moment.
I recommend aggressively muting / unfollowing to keep your feed clean. Anything offensive / negative deserves an unfollow. Irrelevant stuff deserves a mute.
For me, ratio of programming posts / other posts should be 10:1. Also mute people that retweet too much.
Having a follower strategy is also important. For me, Twitter is a part time job, similar to open source work. It's not "fun".
I agree with most of what the author wrote. I also don’t like how I can follow something who has good thoughts on Python but get their thoughts on politics. Then Twitter turned “like” into “maybe retweet” (you see what people you follow liked) so even if they don’t tweet about politics I see the political tweets they liked. I like the focus of subreddits in comparison.
I still use Twitter mostly as a write-only thing if I want to drop off a blog post, another place to reach me, and occasionally check my timeline. Lists are also a recommended feature.
With that said, I think Twitter has a bright future. Why? Because it’s always been a good way for celebrities to reach people. And in a world of Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok etc there are more mini-celebrities than ever and they all use Twitter for any quick thought blurbs. So they’ve really benefited by the expansion of what constitutes a celebrity.
My mom also uses Twitter, never tweets, but just follows news outlets. And it’s the only social media she has as a privacy-oriented person which is interesting.
Like most social media apps, if you don’t use it compulsively and control how you use it, there’s usually at least some value in having a presence.
Whenever I think about signing up because I came across some post and want to provide an answer, I remember that funny GIF that I've seen: "Are u ready to get insanely fucking mad" [1] and somehow hold myself back. I think I'll pass ever singing up for it.
i quit twitter after years of using it when i got exhausted of having to see political tweets from anyone i was following in tech. i just want to follow certain topics, but unfortunately the mute feature is not enough to filter out all the crap
I check Twitter to learn what I should be outraged about. I literally say to myself "I wonder what I should be outraged about today?" and then lo and behold, Twitter tells me. I don't know where else to get that information. I wish I did, since Twitter is very inefficient with too many people retweeting the same tidbit so they can try their hand at a witty rejoinder. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the rejoinders, but they're also exhausting and lower the signal to noise ratio a lot.
There's a lot of stuff I want to know about that I don't know where else to find out about it, and much of this is outraging. For example, a lot of my Twitter feed is people pointing out how the Canadian media misrepresents events with a pro-conservative bias. Perhaps ignorance would be bliss, but I opt for a daily dose of poison to keep my tolerance up.
Have you ever thought that you think your perception of Canadian media is that way because Twitter is full of outraged leftists who think everything right of Marx is "far right propoganda"? Because as a Canadian that stays off of twitter because I find it toxic and not useful, I have to say when you wrote that Canadian media is pro-conservative I kinda laughed out loud a little.
It's possible to unfollow everyone who posts outrage tweets, give it a try. It will become eerily quiet, and hopefully only occasional once-a-day quality tweet will remain.
I recently "quit" Twitter myself. I say "quit" because if you actually delete/remove/whatever your account, your handle may then become available for others to use. To avoid that, I used a combo of scripts/services to remove all of my Twitter data (tweets, likes, follows, etc.) and scrubbed my bio, profile pics, etc. I also set a reminder to log in every 6 months to avoid being purged and have my handle become available that way.
I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates, tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my quality of life and mental well-being have improved.
I say "modern" since social media has really been around since email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are actually still quite enjoyable.
fyi they never actually implemented that "purge inactive accounts" thing. I remember people bringing up the issue of dead people's accounts being deleted/taken over, but idk if that was why they shelved it.
That was something different. Deactivated accounts do get deleted and their names made available after 30 days just like it warns you when you deactivate.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadHN is open discourse, focusing on respect. At least to me.
Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.
That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)
She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset.
She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch.
Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.
I've never been hooked on nicotine or similar, but toward the end of 2017 a game (Simcity Buildit) dug deeeeeeeeep into my soul and for the first time in my life I had to aggressively quit something like that cold turkey.
First I should say: It's a great game and really fun! (HA - I know I sound like a pusher...) I didn't spend any money on it. But man did I spend brain cycles and time on it. A few specific game dynamics really get their hooks into you - this concept of mini game-within-a-game "tournaments" which require your attention over a specific period of time (ahem weekends).
My "rock bottom" was two things: I was on a long drive from LA to SF and I had my girlfriend open up the app to complete a few time-sensitive tasks for me while I was driving. There I was explaining "ok now swipe this. Drag it there. Great. Now do the same on this other thing. Ok thanks love!".
The second was that a common strategy in the game where you start a second instance on a different device to mine certain resources (it was called a "feeder city"). So there I was on any given Friday night sitting on the couch with my iPhone AND iPad open, swiping away.
One day it struck me that there was no end to this cycle. There was no winning. There was just more building and more swiping and more hours to go down the drain, and I just realized I had to quit. So I hard-deleted the game from my phone and iPad right in the middle of a weekend mini-tournament and never looked back.
In the days following, I had very regular twitches and urges to go back. "Just one more"....I realized this was real addiction. Luckily it passed after a few days. But wow - what an eye-opener for me.
It's really well-made. My biggest knock on it is that it's a typical "milk as much money as possible out of the user" game, so you never know which mechanics are truly random or which ones are set up to hack your psychology. Some of the nags/alerts wear on you. I also wish it was a bit more optimized for aesthetics (no diagonal roads!).
But the UX is extremely good. The visuals are nice. The contests and general gameplay goals are engaging and fun. It's 4X-like, with that "one more turn" vibe and the need to balance multiple goals.
So you think “oh I just saw those!” And keep spinning the slot machine wheels of the marketplace. And then when they DO finally appear, that little dopamine hit is all the sweeter :)
I see this alleged all the time, but a part of me is convinced that it's a trick of the mind. But I don't know, and that's what's frustrating. Even if they don't pull the rug out from you, they could do so at any time and I'd never know it. Not great!
I recently blogged about that [1]. It's in spanish, but Google translate does an acceptable job with it.
[1] https://blog.jazzido.com/uncategorized/2021/02/12/mejore-su-...
The site's tagline should be "Meet your heroes!"
If worthy enough, you could even share the link to any one of them on Twitter. ;)
The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go.
I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.
Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That's the source of so much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it's also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!
Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public conversation."
God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever.
I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, really fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.
Twitter is so because it is designed to encourage arguments (to generate "engagement") and you can avoid it.
They tell you when your tweets are reported even if no action is taken, just to make you mad that people are reporting you.
They tell you when someone blocks you and you can't visit their twitter anymore even though you can if you log out.
Who would build a system like this unless they wanted to fuel drama?
There are people that are very good friends of mine in Real Life, but their Twitter profiles show a completely toxic persona. This doesn't happen with their other social media profiles.
TikTok on the other hand shows up higher more "feel-good" content which is why it's the only social media app I have installed on my phone.
I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on other social networks.
* assuming that Twitter is mostly toxic
* or that avoiding toxicity isn't mental work
What is it where I'm wrong, and if so, why?
I think it's super cool to be able to interact with different people doing interesting things (a little like HN, but it's easier to remember who the people are where as on HN I never remember 99% of the usernames in threads).
If you want to be extreme about it, you can put everyone in lists and then this won't happen. You can also use a third party client that doesn't do this.
My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many and they suck. I'd much rather have Twitter premium that removes the ads.
There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.
Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's the only way to fly.
To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this tends towards hostility and partisanship.
Observations: I know longer expend energy thinking about the terrible state of discourse on twitter, the sanctimony, bad faith, etc. Also, my thought patterns seem to be changing, my brain feels like it has “spare capacity” and I find myself starting new hobbies. Just anecdata, but I am certain I am calmer and less worried about twitter destroying humanity!
I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.
You can see everyone else is constantly tweeting about how awful the Capulets are - your friends mostly aren't, but they're retweeting people who are. You remember one time you expressed some doubts about something the Montagues did and people you don't know turned up to tell you off. You think the Capulets might actually be right about something this one time, but you don't dare say it.
Private conversations give you more room to be wrong, to be uncertain, to be curious, to be uninterested. On Twitter you always have an audience.
Not to pick on it but compared to curated reddit / twitter, I found it very hard to find anything interesting on discord I kept jumping from server to server.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
I don't have a solution. But it's a real problem.
Basically, you make a strawman argument: rather than arguing whatever point your opponent was claiming, you make something up and argue against that instead.
But since you're arguing on the internet, you can always find some dipshit somewhere who actually supports the insane thing you made up. So you turn to your opponent and say "look at what your side believes!"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
Even though cancel culture is probably overreacting, I'm not sure if there is another way than to get rid of the toxic loud minority.
I'm a mod in a subreddit that has a very toxic circle jerk sister subreddit. Like "jokes about the recently died father of one of the persons the main subreddit is about" bad. Some people frequent both subreddits and while they are just behaved enough to not be straight banned in the main subreddit, their behavior in the circle jerk would well justify a perma bann.
In my experience there is no reasoning with certain persons. Even if they seem reasonable 80% of the time, the 20% completely destroy any basis for normal discussions. There's a latent sentiment that creeps into every discussion if you don't remove these persons. Even if they haven't shown their bad side in the main subreddit.
I used to run my own BBS back in the dialup days. Even then, the problems would be recognisable to a modern forum mod.
The only workable solutions I've found are that the more focused a board on a select number of topics, the easier it is to effectively moderate in a humane manner, and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success. In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.
In my special case, we have a very heterogeneous audience because we are not mono thematical. It is quite problematic if you have people coming together who have widely different expectations.
> and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success.
I agree. Never do this. The rules will always be used against you, regardless of how detailed they are. And discussions about rules take up so much time. Keep them short and concise but also make clear that they are not set in stone. You will need leeway anyway.
> In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.
The "significant brain-time" is a problem. You are outnumbered and then fighthing and debunking bullshit takes much more time than producing it (the Trump tactic).
For my case, I came to the conclusion that being nice 80% of the time is good enough. Save the 20% evilness for the notorious cases and you can cut down a lot of mod time. Educating newbies is a different matter but for regulars, I started to warn them one time and afterwards I start temporarily banning in a fibonacci like manner for every subsequent temporary bann. Most get it then or even leave before I have to perma-bann them.
I wonder if he still would or if the amount of spam hitting public figures from every direction is so overwhelming that they can't possibly respond to it all. And I wonder how much of the "responses" you get from blue checks on Twitter is really them and how much is a hired social media manager running their account.
I get a lot more value out of forums about a topic, or HN, or groups of friends I already know. Facebook groups on my hobbies, etc. Joining/participating in "private" (but open to anyone) groups rather than broadcasting outwards to all and getting engagement through shock/clickbait type content.
That doesn't mean what works for me has to work for you, though, and of course it's without getting into how problematic one platform's LEADERSHIP might be versus another.
I have written mistakes and apologized for them. It seems most of you accept that. Or maybe it's so heavily moderated i only see the stuff i'm allowed to see. I don't know.
I've tried Twitter a few days and decided it's not for me. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, forums, irc, etc. Some parts of them are quite useful, but for the most they are a very stressful environment to participate in.
They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content is clickbaity enough and benefits the platform's own advertising metrics. You can only ever be a sharecropper on censorship platforms, no matter how successful you become.
I had >20k followers after more than a decade on Twitter, and I deleted. Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send.
Fuck censorship.
I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?
There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship."
Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing for engagement and advertising is not like a government deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader.
It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf space, or build enough demand for your product that the store decides it can make more money giving you better positioning.
Twitter also moderates content in a way that has nothing to do with engagement and making them money. But if you give someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they feel like monetizing that content.
If you don't like it, write a blog.
Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while that's not actually the case.
It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move, and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be considered as broken.
As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it, it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out.
The thing we have to understand is that we who want a microblogging platform aren't their market. They're not interested in people with 500-5,000 followers using Twitter to publish things that every one of their followers will see.
Likewise, they're not interested in people who want to just follow certain people and see 100% of their tweets. That's not their business model. Do I like that? No. But I'm not their customer, I'm the product they sell to their customers.
———
One thing I find very interesting about discussions like this is how closely they resemble discussions from the 1970s and 1980s about what computers were for. It seems quaint now, but people once said computers were for business, not games.
Then a younger generation came along and when all the old fogies died off or retired, gaming became a gajillion-dollar industry.
Now we get pronouncements like "That's not what Twitter's for." Obviously it is what Twitter's for, because millions of people are using it that way and are "Happy as Larry," oblivious to the fact that it used to be a microblogging platform, and if we ask 100 randomly chosen Twitter employees, exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective and they're working hard to restore its value as a way to subscribe to everything people tweet.
I kind of feel like those of us who miss its microblogging origin are metaphorically members of an older generation than those who are happily Tweeting, TikToking, SnapChatting, &c.
They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".
---
> are "Happy as Larry,"
Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?
> exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective
They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.
You have something there that applies to all of social media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok). Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting and what I'm missing.
The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a certain type of person, and you and I are probably those kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they ought to care.
Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can install, which apps appear on the front page of the app store, &c.
It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't like it will change their minds.
This is a very interesting point, to which I will say that people who complain or praise any product are always the vocal minority.
As I alluded to in another reply, we regularly get impassioned posts and comments about what's wrong with iOS on HN, and yet we know for a fact that many, many, MANY people are happy with their iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches.
Most people are fine not having any privacy, because they believe that they have nothing to hide.
The danger comes from making it impossible to publish unpopular things or publish anonymously, or making privacy impossible. There is a percentage of people for whom these things are not only important but essential, and when we close off those options then we lose the important aspects of society facilitated by those people. Those aspects benefit everyone.
We should pay very close attention to the complaints of those people, even if (or perhaps especially because) they are a minority of users.
There's a phrase for this: "Defective by design." Meaning, what we the observer consider to be a harmful quality of the product is not an accident or oversight, but a deliberate choice.
I say similar things about Slack's iPad client. It's defective by design.
Likewise, web sites that choose not to be accessible are defective-by-design. If you ask their product manager, the response will be, "Accessibility is not a priority, and we can live with people who need accessible web sites doing business with someone else."
Of course, it's implicit in the phrase "defective by design" that this kind of defective is not exactly the same kind of "defective" as the product not doing the thing its creators designed it to do, or not doing the thing that their target market expect it to do.
And when my blog host starts hiding my posts? What then? Will you tell me the same thing?
I did write a blog. On Twitter.
I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email) to your internet friends.
I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet your tweets and so their friends find you).
I got to 25% of my Twitter numbers (after 12 years on Twitter) within only a year or two of writing consistently on my own site. By those figures, I am discovered and followed more and faster on my own site than I ever was on Twitter.
YMMV, of course.
I think this is one of the bigger factors when people choose to quit social networks, even if they don't realize it explicitly. There's such a "hustle culture" to get likes and favorites that it really warps what you can post. You can't really be vulnerable on a social network because it either gets ignored or interpreted as another hustle ("You got this!!!") because the surrounding content from everyone else is "Look at how great I am!". YouTube creators have to explicitly say "Please like and subscribe!" but that's implicit and pervasive on Twitter and Facebook by their very nature.
The biggest problem is viral misinformation combined with a focus on people that are "good with Twitter". Someone with a bunch of followers tweets something like "the sun rose in the north this morning" and if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you and all their tweets will be liked and retweeted.
The reason I used Twitter back in the day was to find out what was happening in the world and to interact with others. These days there are too many that think a big follower count means they can tweet stuff that's wrong.
Then there's the other stuff where you have to see someone called out for calling women brilliant (yep, happened today).
Try as I might, I can't return my timeline to what it was, and I can now go a week without looking at it and I don't miss anything.
Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?
But I do want to thank you for a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads. Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect, and in most cases, it's made up so they can get likes and retweets. The post-truth world is alive and well. And, unfortunately, profitable for some.
Which misinformation did I spread?
> Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect
That's quite an interference.
To them, their timeline is "curated" to remove "toxic" elements, which makes their filter bubble more pleasant. Then they blame you, even in this very thread, for finding these interactions useless. That isn't misinformation, that is a point of view.
The biggest problem is that Twitter- and Mastodon-style blocking make it impossible to engage with people who need to be engaged with, regardless of why (whether informational or emotional).
Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to listen to random strangers who want to argue with you? Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard you, and then decided to come over and butt into the conversation? And when the stranger is told to go away, they complain "You're talking in a public place where people can hear you, what did you expect?" And somehow the stranger feels that they're wronged by that.
I don't understand your reply.
> Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.
The point is that in order to meet other people, you have to go out into the public. But that doesn't mean you want to meet with and talk with anyone and everyone out in the public. It's a terrible tradeoff if the only way you can get pleasant social interaction with others is to also suffer unpleasant social interaction with strangers who want to argue with you.
None of us designed Twitter. We have to take it as it is. Twitter is public, yes, but that's not an excuse for you personally to debate with every stranger you happen to disagree with. That's not on Twitter, that's on you.
I quit twitter years ago for some of the same reasons mentioned in this blog post, and I 100% agree with this quote. I would love a way to get at the good content from twitter without all the constant rage.
Does anyone know a good tool or way to get a much more curated Twitter experience?
> only shows retweets from people you follow
yes, but only shows you _select_ retweets from people you follow. You don't control that. Anything in your timeline that is curated can be used to manipulate you. And those retweets and likes are enough. Just wait until you see a retweet or like and think "but that's wrong / I disagree / waat" and try to catch yourself - you've been shown it for a reason.
Edit: The other big thing for me is just unfollowing/blocking people who post garbage, with no remorse. It doesn't matter if your feed is 95% gold, the 5% that isn't makes you not worth it.
Which reminds me, I need to clean up and publish my Huginn agent for posting to Mastodon/Pleroma. :)
(Nitter supports RSS, so you could probably use a regular RSS reader instead of Huginn/Pleroma. But I also configured some other, non-RSS, content in my feed.)
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1] https://github.com/huginn/huginn [2] https://pleroma.social/
And then I felt increasingly disconnected from everyone because of being stuck at home in a pandemic. And I started tweeting a little more, and getting pretty much nothing back. And then I had a bad interaction (nothing abusive, just confrontational), and I uninstalled the app from my phone.
I basically agree with everything in TFA. There is fun, interesting and sometimes even insightful stuff on Twitter. But people become warped. It's incredibly difficult to actually have a two-way communication on Twitter; people will misinterpret and assume the worst about everything you write.
And I was not immune to this effect either - I realised when I went back over the back-and-forth that had felt so emotionally charged at the time, that I had also been assuming the worst and replying without the open mind that might have led to a better interaction.
It can also be a toxic place that puts you in a bad head space and wastes time. A ticking time bomb that can blow up your productivity at any moment.
I recommend aggressively muting / unfollowing to keep your feed clean. Anything offensive / negative deserves an unfollow. Irrelevant stuff deserves a mute.
For me, ratio of programming posts / other posts should be 10:1. Also mute people that retweet too much.
Having a follower strategy is also important. For me, Twitter is a part time job, similar to open source work. It's not "fun".
yeah, sure, it can be gotten around, but
misinformation or sensationionalist crap shared so easily, so cheaply, has a lot of unintended consequences.
I still use Twitter mostly as a write-only thing if I want to drop off a blog post, another place to reach me, and occasionally check my timeline. Lists are also a recommended feature.
With that said, I think Twitter has a bright future. Why? Because it’s always been a good way for celebrities to reach people. And in a world of Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok etc there are more mini-celebrities than ever and they all use Twitter for any quick thought blurbs. So they’ve really benefited by the expansion of what constitutes a celebrity.
My mom also uses Twitter, never tweets, but just follows news outlets. And it’s the only social media she has as a privacy-oriented person which is interesting.
Like most social media apps, if you don’t use it compulsively and control how you use it, there’s usually at least some value in having a presence.
[1] https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/11630943816389304...
The Daily Mail is a fairly good source of 'fury' (a term they use a lot in their headlines).
I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates, tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my quality of life and mental well-being have improved.
I say "modern" since social media has really been around since email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are actually still quite enjoyable.
I’d really like to find something similar for Instagram. I want to consume that without creating an account, but haven’t figure out how.
And FYI, per its website, Fraidycat says it does support Instagram, although I can't vouch for the experience as it's not a platform I use.