Ask HN: Am I the only one baffled by the long term usage of Twitter?
I deleted my account, but then created a new one because some tweets and threads were more easily viewable with an account. This lead to build a more serious Twitter profile again.
However, I realised the actual ROI of using Twitter is so negative, it's shocking. Even interesting threads turn out to be half-wrong. I see takes from 10k+ follower accounts who are not well researched, one sided and all. Tech twitter things just because they are good at programming, they have a valid view on topic Y.
Now this is all common knowledge I believe. But Jesus, I stumbled across accounts which I used to follow, and these people post still every few hours or days the same take on public outcry and nothing changed. They do this for 8+ years now, you can scroll back by years and it's the same over and over again.
I wonder if someone has a take which changes my mind or what makes them do this stupid things? Imagine looking back on your life when you are 60 and seeing that you tweeted stuff with no effect WHAT SO EVER and you did this for 30 years of your life. Isn't this so depressing?
111 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadI call Twitter a "hate laser." Hate bounces back and forth between camps of angry people and is amplified until it shoots out and causes damage in the real world. Twitter isn't the only platform like this or even the most toxic, but I think it does the most harm by virtue of its size.
Virtually all discourse on there is toxic, but especially anything that touches politics. The political position doesn't matter. No matter what it is the content is always a barrage of lazy memes, brutal ad hominem, and the violent dismemberment of straw men.
It seems like sound advice. I tried it, but Twitter still didn't "stick" for me. Primarily I did not find curating my own experience to be work I enjoyed doing, and it certainly did not net me a return that justified the investment of my time or mental energy. So I stick to re-directing individual tweets to nitter.net.
Very true. Even Twitter replies are often like a "dialog" of monologues.
As you walk around hearing people talk, everyone is getting a bit drunk, so their conversations sometimes get a bit out there and more extreme out of context.
Also, the bar gives free drinks for people that get into arguments, so there's incentive to interject randomly into conversations with your own view point.
And anyone that drinks socially knows drunken arguments aren't particularly productive most of the time.
I'm a news junkie Twitter is my main source of current events/news. I mostly follow journalists from outlets I consider trustworthy, subject matter experts in areas of interest, and comedians who I find funny on podcasts.
• Encourage other people - if you like the work someone is doing, tell them!
• Be positive - a feed full of negativity is zero fun to follow.
• Share what you're working on - people are drawn to other people in motion.
I also am very careful about who I follow. I don't "hate-follow" anyone. And I'm pretty liberal with regard to muting stuff.
There is a big trend right now (or always?) of people grifting on Twitter, and I mute every single one of those people. It's all the engagement-bait stuff that you're probably super familiar with. Questions that aren't questions, half-baked thought threads, and hot takes that are only there to gin up "engagement."
I recorded a podcast[1] with some friends recently about how to use Twitter as a human being and not a grifter. They were both super anti-Twitter and I was able to swing them my direction a bit. I think most people just follow the wrong people and get sucked into the hate machine.
There are definitely corners of Twitter that are a lot of fun and very valuable!
[0] https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1434287141887021058
[1] https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e
Another excellent example of this positive and no BS version of Twitter (though probably well-known on HN already) is Andreas Kling [0] (creator of SerenityOS).
[0] https://twitter.com/awesomekling
I think you nailed it with that.
One of the things I'm fond of saying is "being excited is underrated." If you're actually excited about something you're working on, or something cool that someone else is doing, be excited! I think lots of people try to hard to be "cool" instead of potentially letting themselves look silly by being excited. (Also this goes well beyond Twitter, into real life.)
It blows my mind that anybody would actually do this, but I guess it's a thing.
If you've been on Twitter since the early days, you have noticed how it has become more and more about dunking and hate-quoting. Once you have an algorithm that decides what content causes the most engagement, you learn that negative emotions make people act. It's hard to scroll Twitter and not want to yell at something you disagree with. The medium itself does not lead to constructive conversation. This comment would require a Twitter thread, which is a scary thing to write. Every single tweet in a thread can be taken out of context, and you have to write accordingly.
As a company, Twitter has stopped innovating a while ago. The product has been stagnant, and so has the market cap. I expect that eventually it will collapse when the most interesting people to follow simply stop engaging, but that might take years.
My solution is to engage as little as I am capable of. I deleted the app from my phone, and I have a personal rule of only posting inoffensive shower thoughts that almost never get any reactions. I never get involved in an argument there.
I use it to collect people I follow, post some snarky tweets that amuse myself and my wife, and occasionally interact with people I normally wouldn't otherwise.
In that regard, it's successful.
For the people you're following, it's massively successful as a platform of promotion. I'm constantly looking to the people I follow for their takes on current events, and I love how unfiltered/direct it is, given the length restriction. If I like someone consistently, I'll seek them out on other, probably more-profitable for them, platforms.
If Twitter depresses you, I think then life is probably generally depressing; there's nothing uniquely "useless" or "meaningless" about Twitter, no more so than posting this comment on HN or literally anything else that's to be swallowed by our sun going supernova in a few billion years...
If you don't occasionally go back and prune the former tweets, you may find yourself interacting with many new people!
Why are so many smart and insightful people on Twitter? Because it's easier than blogging or microblogging? I see links to their interesting threads referenced on Reddit or HN and I follow those links, but I can't bring myself to care enough about Twitter (or Nitter) to actively follow anyone.
I guess if something is valuable enough on Twitter I'll hear about it elsewhere. Not sure if that approach holds up.
I'm looking forward to whatever replaces Twitter. I've been waiting for that thing for about a decade.
However I do not relate to your experience of it. Over the years I've curated a nice set of people to follow and I've had extremely rewarding experiences. I've learned a lot, invested in companies, received investment, all stemming from interactions I've had on Twitter.
I definitely occasionally see some of what you're talking about and it creeps into my bubble but I'm diligent about tracking down how it got there and unfollowing whoever pushed it into my field of view.
If I can be frank your post here is an example of the kind of stuff I usually push away. Fairly absolute stance with little articulation/empathy of the opposing viewpoint. Taking some of the genuinely negative behavior and implying it must be the entirety of everyone using Twitter.
Twitter tends to reflect yourself and if you're honest with yourself you'll often see that you seek out the things that upset you.
The one major gap in that is I'd love to be able to follow or add to a list just an accounts tweets but not their retweets, there are some people I follow that I love their work but they retweet to boost a lot of random chaff I don't really want, so I can't follow or add them to a list because they just dominate/pollute the feed.
Lists in particular are a good tool because you can quasi-follow someone on a private list where a) it doesn't show up in your follows if they're someone/thing you don't want showing up in your follows and b) you choose when to go see those things so you can self regulate easier if it's not something you can/should see all the time.
Like HN, keeping it short has its advantages and I've also learned-by-reading how people say it short and with impact.
One has to be super careful about pruning accounts that are predictable, RT too much, or waste time attacking straw men.
Of course I don't post anything other than comments on art.
I have a private account with about 100 lists which I step into at my own leisure. You don't get promoted tweets when viewing a list, and the signal to noise ratio is better than Twitter's 'You may like' / Topics BS. I don't use Twitter to chase fame and reject any follow requests I get since I enjoy my privacy.
Any little thoughts I have during the day are kept in my journal, not broadcasted publicly where I would probably regret tweeting it a year later.
But this kind of problem is also not unique or even particularly aggravated on Twitter or social media in general. Funnily enough I think it was the post-modernists like Baudrillard who first forcefully articulated this problem, but most of the time people talk about post-modernists as if they enjoy the fact that culture and politics have become dominated by symbols and simulacra. I've barely read anything on the topic, but that's my understanding.
I should add the important caveat that mass non-symbolic politics is possible, so I'm not advocating some kind of blunt "anti mob and everything 'popular' is the mob" position. But wherever you find that, it probably won't be on Twitter.
Shortly after I made that account, I decided to do an experiment to see how quickly I could gather followers, even though I had next to no tweets. All I did was click through random accounts and followed them. Surprisingly, many of them followed me back. It only took me a few days of clicking around to get a few hundred followers. If I had kept it up, could I have amassed thousands?
I stopped that experiment quickly because I didn't really care. It told me everything I needed to know, and I had no motivation to go back.
Its continued relevance is a bit depressing, IMO. It's hard for me to imagine that the average person actually gets more out of it than they put in, despite how clearly it can be beneficial for certain individuals and circumstances (as can be said of nearly anything). Overall, my impression of Twitter is that it is largely composed of negativity and snark, and the way it works seems to create more collectivism and mass social illness. If Twitter went belly-up, maybe I'd be kind of happy about it?
A while back I made it a lot better by running a script that turned off retweets for everyone I followed at the time. New people I follow are on Retweet Probation and it's always kind of amusing when I decide to turn off someone's retweets because they're mostly sharing stuff designed to create outrage and I see next to nothing from them any more.
I miss Livejournal.
There's nothing particularly constructive, no suggestion for "fixing" the problems you articulate, it's a human being—you— talking about their perfectly valid feelings—that Twitter is a waste of focus.
If you can understand why you feel it's valuable to post this rant on HN and have a conversation in public with those who choose to reply to it, you can understand why people post rants on Twitter.
p.s. If HN was nothing except these Ask HN posts, it would be Twitter. What makes it HN is that this kind of post is infrequent.
p.p.s. I don't object to this post on HN or the value of having a conversation about what makes another social media site good/bad/meh.
For example, this forum is moderated, Twitter is almost completely unmoderated. This forum allows for longer replies but bans pictures. Twitter forces you to create threads, but allows pictures.
I doubt anybody in the middle of an argument would cool down and change their minds, but it does provide an opportunity to go look at something else and forget about going back and dropping that zinger you planned to launch...
It's pretty orthogonal to my views otherwise, but its the only thing that can explain how social media distorts things. Giving every Tom, Dick and Harry a mouthpiece that can reach millions is probably a maladaptation to a healthy and productive society.
A person who before might have before just been a village or local kook, can now be a guiding voice to millions, with little effort on their part, and little way for the rest of us to push back.
I've seen people that I respect appear to lose their sanity from things being said on it. An example is Sam Harris, who is of course a brilliant author and neuroscientist.
He's gone from a person I respected a lot for his thoughts on atheism and spirituality to being a person who I've heard dedicate hours of podcasts to basically complaining about what people say on twitter. As an adult, it's almost shocking to hear someone intelligent revert to anguishing about the same things misguided teenagers might concern themselves with.
He's not the only one. It appears famous people who use twitter end up using it as a scope into what they might perceive the real world to be like. However, what seems to be the discourse on twitter has no relation to the discourse in my neighborhood (in Western North Carolina) or my previous neighborhood (East Village, NYC).
So no, OP, you're not the only one baffled. I'm extremely baffled.
The trick is to not follow accounts that talk about politics and to ignore people when their opinions are not based on their expertise. Also ignore accounts that are too sure about their own opinions.