American political discourse involving the uneducated is a cesspool. Social commentary often leads to political discourse which makes that type of speech sadly often one step away from a cesspool. Twitter is simply facilitating it.
Stop following people who post political things or opinions about social issues and the toxicity is much, much less.
I sometimes see posts that I like and want to retweet but I don't because it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say. It's not worth the risk.
People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink. So it's best for me to avoid it entirely.
Isn't the whole dynamic of twitter that it can make a highly vocal minority viewpoint seem like an oppressive majority viewpoint, where reality is that it's like a heckler's veto on amphetamines with a megaphone?
That’s the minefield of posting online. People measure your comments from 20 years ago with today’s sensitivity yardstick. I know I made wisecrack jokes decades ago that would get me fired today. Who knows whether some innocuous thing you say today will be horrendously taboo 20 years from now?
Totally agree, being attacked for your viewpoint used to be just a problem for minority viewpoints/identities. But now even those who were previously safe are seeing increasing risk in backlashes.
We have gone from silencing the minority to silencing the majority, this is terrible, but silver lining is that now maybe more people are invested in solving the problem.
Maybe instead of demographic, it's about people whose public image is part of their job. Like startup executives, academics, athletes, politicians (even "low-level" politicians like city councilman), product managers, or venture capitalists. That's a lot of people who are juicier targets than someone earlier in their career, like a student, an associate, or entry-level software developer.
This exactly. I once tried the twitter game, I thought it was important to have a big following or say clever things, whatever.
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!
Exact same story except recently I created an empty account with private lists that I follow (so not even the people I "follow" is public), and I can still keep up with some topics from a source of information that generally is on the bleeding edge. Usually I find things in twitter / discord first, then they hit Reddit, then mainstream media. If you only follow reddit you have a slight delay currently, and for some of my interests, fresh information is helpful.
This is why I rarely interact on Twitter and I have a script that deletes all my tweets that are over X days old. If I say something truely insightful, I'll just make a blog post out of it.
A good person who doesn't use Twitter (someone who might fix cars, or works on a fishing vessel for example) who is having this little discussion about what is "good" and "ok" might very easily use the wrong words and offend someone.
That’s not possible. People take offense at everything. Or they will tomorrow.
That’s the real problem: the standards of “good” and “decent” shift from time to time. What is fine today may get you canceled tomorrow.
Thus, it is not safe to put your opinions out there in any form that could come back to bite you. If you want to take that risk, fine. But do not pretend that it is safe.
It really isn't changing that much though. Maybe if you think someone might be offended by what you say in 10 years, maybe don't say it now. It's probably offensive now
I don't think i hold offensive beliefs (controversial maybe, as we see here, but no ones getting their feelings hurt), if I did and learned about I'd change them. It seems easy to not be offensive though, what kind of beliefs are people having trouble with?
There are some issues where it seems impossible to hold a non-offensive belief. You can't support abortion or oppose abortion or claim abortion is unimportant without genuinely hurting a lot of people's feelings. (I wouldn't deny that you can avoid being offensive by simply avoiding all controversial issues, and in some contexts that's a perfectly reasonable approach.)
Has it slowed down? The change over the last 10 years, and over the 10 before that, was fast. Just watching mass media from the early parts of those two spans should make that clear.
You can't physically hurt people on twitter, as it's all information. So whether or not you hurt someone is (at least partly) dependent on how people react. That can be hard to predict.
Your comment offends my intelligence, therefore you've hurt a person, therefore you're not a "good person" anymore.
But you might not care about that. You might say that I'm arguing in bad faith, or that your words couldn't possibly have offended me. But you don't get to redefine it.
Obviously, you might just not care that you've just offended me. That's what bad people do. You aren't a bad person, right? Could you please apologize?
That's an unreasonable standard. If I chose to see your use of the phrase 'clover got you' as some slur against Irish people and was offended, would you have offended me?
This is an unfair question, not because it's not a reasonable one given your argument, but because if you say 'yes' I can't take you seriously.
Of course, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the response is when people are offended. I can certainly modify my language and behavior to reduce the chances of offending someone. I can even apologize when I've accidentally put my foot in my mouth.
Twitter lacks the tolerance and nuance for either of those scenarios, though. If something 'not ok' is said, what was intended or meant doesn't matter (and any nuanced is typically ignored). An apology isn't seen as an apology for a mistake, but as an admission of guilt of being a terrible person who doesn't deserve oxygen.
Being canceled isn't even a real thing. It's just a phrase people use because they have to have consequences when they show their true selves. Some group of people don't agree with you? Show me an example of being canceled then
If you really think it's not a thing, here's an early cancellation. Pretty much everyone involved lost their jobs, and it was all over social media for a cycle.
> Though the show’s ratings were still good in season four, ABC cancelled the series because of continued pressure from the so-called “moral majority.” By the end of the series, Vlasic pickles was the only advertiser interested in advertising on the series. In They’ll Never Put That on the Air, executive producer Paul Junger Witt said, “We weren’t killed by a fearful network. The network had been incredibly supportive. We had been doing this long enough to understand that they were in a business, and they sat down and showed us — dollar for dollar — why they couldn’t afford to do it anymore.”
The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
> The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
More like people who complain about being victim of the cancel culture are the ones who were oblivious to it until they became the victim. Currently the cancel culture is being associated as some kind of PC culture outcome but it originated way before. The push back or critisim against it seems to be only happening now.
I don’t think so. Abhorrent behavior has always been abhorrent. The people using these tactics even often acknowledge it’s ugly behavior but feel vindicated (and even righteous). Some people are hypocrites. This is all just quite a bit easier and more visible than in the past. If anything has changed beyond scale and politics, it’s that people arguing against it are more easily heard.
You've already made up your mind, so if you're not interested in actually understanding why cancelling both exists and is a problem, you can probably sit this conversation out. You want an example, fine.
In many scenarios canceling is completely arbitrary, based on misquotes, lack of context, or total fabrication simply because someone, somewhere was offended and can get other people to act on their behalf.
In the best case scenario, the person being canceled is actually a shitty human being. I know such a person. He said some really stupid stuff online, was called out on it, doubled down on it, was doxxed and canceled. He's not the type of person who considers the consequences of his actions in any scenario. He's also actually stupid and not a friend of mine. I think he's as close to hot garbage as a human being can get without actually abusing or murdering other people.
However, this person still did not deserve death threats for the words he wrote. This person did not deserve people calling his employer threatening to burn down their building. The employer certainly didn't deserve that. His coworkers didn't deserve it. This person did not deserve his house to be vandalized; nor did the actual owner of the house. His roommates didn't deserve to live in fear and to have to deal with angry people maybe thinking they were him.
These behaviors are not justifiable. They are, in fact, less justifiable than someone saying awful things online. Writing them off as "consequences" is simply twisted.
The problem is that you can have a not-ok opinion and still be a good person who has a positive effect on the world, but we have no tolerance for that. We demand public perfection.
What's "good"? I think it's at least OK to suggest that covid vaccines are generally good, and most people who are eligible should get them. But it's a social media shit-storm. I'm not interested.
Got attacked by dozens of people and eventually a twitter account ban for suggesting that free-speech is important and Chappelle's latest special shouldn't be removed from Netflix.
No, this is exactly what happened. My tweet suggested nearly verbatim what I said above, and in response I got verbally abused and insulted by literally dozens of people from the trans community. They scrubbed through my tweet history, replying to old tweets and reporting anything they could. They reported a very old tweet where I promoted pacifism (I'm a pacifist), but it was sarcastic, stating that if we are gonna punch Nazis, we might as well punch mujahideen, ISIS, pro-lifers, Zionists, etc. They took advantage of the fact that sarcasm can be read both ways, and I was banned for promoting violence. Nevertheless I was cancelled due to my comments on free speech.
Choose to believe it or not, that's your business, but this is exactly what happened.
I would ask you to think back to 2019 when a large majority on Twitter and from the mainstream media took a picture of some high school boys in Washington DC and brandied them about as the face of racism in America.
>In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O'Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by "2020fight" as the one that "helped frame the news cycle" of the previous days, and characterized the video as a "deliberate attempt" to mislead and "manipulate the public conversation on Twitter"—a violation of Twitter rules.[76] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story.
To add to my point of 'OK':
On January 22, shortly after tweeting it, comedian Kathy Griffin deleted a Twitter message in which she accused Covington basketball players making an OK gesture of "throwing up the new nazi sign".
You can not run a society on mobs. I am not sure if it is Twitters design, the speed of information, the need to feel like part of the in group and/or a combination of all and more that is leading to the formation of mobs but it is not healthy.
I also think there is some cultural values at play as well, where the number of Twitter followers, being an influencer, or just being self centered is seen as a positive thing.
Part of me thinks that it might be related to the gamification of everything, if I post more more(of the right thing) I get more likes, followers, retweets by celebrity. Rather than if I post clear concise or well thought out things. Quality over quantity as it were.
While I don't think most of the people engaging with you are doing so completely in good faith, I don't think you understand the "fickleness" of the tweeting masses either.
Just like you're getting downvotes and a lot of blowback for your opinion on this matter here, it's way worse on twitter.
I've heard someone say that twitter is a game where the goal is not to be the main character of the day. And that kind of holds. Twitter is a bit geared for outrage. Small snippets with no context. Say you don't like The Batman and you could find yourself under a barrage of hate and vitriol. It's not a left thing or a right thing, they both have their mobs on twitter, in addition to all the other random mobs floating about. Hell, say something shitty about the wrong product will have that mob after you.
are people using cancel to refer to the pile on mobs or what they consider unfair escalation in consequences? i mentioned in another post, im on the receiving end on a pile on I think, but i wouldn't say i'm being canceled.
if you say internet communities have an issue with pile on mobs and harassment, id agree but i think that's different then canceling, which i don't think happens to the average person or they even need to worry about
"Cancel" is a nebulous term, it means almost whatever the person using it wants to mean.
Is banning cancelling? What about HN's rate limiting? Being harrassed off of a platform?
All these things have been called "cancelling" by someone. And fair play by others. I think, in this context, we do have to consider the mobs as a part of "cancelling" because this is a thread about an article about people who don't engage in social media. Partly due to the fear of the amount of negative engagement.
>It's really easy to not be "canceled", just be a good person.
I think you've really highlighted here why there's so much backlash against the latest wave of political correctness.
To many people, myself included, a "good person" is someone who can be counted on to help a friend in need, goes out of their way to make the day of the people they interact with that little bit more special (this is something I need to work on), and works hard to provide for their family in whatever way they can.
In my experience at least, a lot of the people who say the right words and hold the right opinions will flake on a friend in their hour of need, or avoid speaking with certain kinds of people lest they say the wrong thing. On the contrary, I can name several people who have dark senses of humour or right-wing beliefs, but will always go above and beyond to help out their community and the people they care about (yes, LGBT people and ethnic minorities too!).
I'm not saying that PC people are worse than non-PC people (if anything, it's probably uncorrelated), but the fact that you've binned people into "good" and "bad" based on how PC their opinions are is just, at least in my opinion, completely out of step with the view of general society.
On the contrary, this seems to me a very healthy way to live. Until the last 15 years, very few people had their views expressed beyond a narrow circle. Standing on a public stage and shouting your every thought would have seemed crazy.
I don't think Speakers' Corner is remotely comparable to how social media works today.
Very few people spoke there, and very little of what they said was distributed beyond Hyde Park or recorded for posterity. I'm lucky enough to have seen a couple of people speak there, and they were both rather... eccentric. And even they didn't stand there all day, every day giving their opinions on everything that happened.
The point I was making was the risk exists. Consider the scenario: Author says something interesting; I retweet; Author later says something awful which I don't even know about; My retweet is still present and can make me guilty by association.
This is very common on Twitter. It's not a place I can haphazardly navigate. I can't stay up to date on the latest outrage or who has fallen from glory.
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” - Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis
It doesn't matter what their views are. If someone decides they don't like them and that person have enough followers, they will find something.
Your comment implies that surely any cancellation of someone for their views must be justifiable.
That's an insane premise, but even if we presume it to be true, it still doesn't cover the case of _future_ cancellation when someone finds your tweets 10 years later and decides they aged like milk.
There are many comments I would have made 5-10 years ago, that I wouldn't make today. Sure, that's mostly due to maturity, but I've also adjusted my self-filter to account for a changing environment and audience.
At this point, I write all political comments under pseudonyms. It's not because I'm scared of getting cancelled — on the contrary, I wish I could argue my positions from my real name. But there is a lot of risk, for little benefit – I'm not a "journalist" or blogger or anyone with a career that depends on my political viewpoints. So why bother?
In general, online political comments gain me nothing, and there is no way to predict how those comments might look in a week, month, or even years from now. I do still write plenty of them, under pseudonyms (like this one), but it's more of a hobby to practice my writing. But I'm also not ashamed of anything I've written under any of the accounts – I would gladly defend all my opinions in person (to those close to me, who already know my feelings, and – btw, because they're sane – have never "cancelled" me).
Who knows, maybe one day I'll even tweet my pseudonym usernames so I can show everyone how right I was five years ago.
I’m so afraid of Twitter that I even created a distinct account with a default username—“user12345” or something of that nature. My old account had my photo and maybe my name.
I can’t even risk having people see who I follow, and on Twitter who you follow is public.
Twitter is a massively multiplayer video game that is culturally overvalued and entrenched because journalism and other influential fields got sucked in. It is absolutely insane that it is taken so seriously. It's also super weird that everyone is so addicted to this game they play it out in public.
To illustrate this: imagine your ideal day. It could be on vacation, or hanging out at home, anywhere really. The key: imagine you are happy, or at least content. Now, do your imaginings ever have you reading angry tweets by people you hardly know for longer than you'd like?
Never joined the game, never will, see absolutely 0 reason. I don't care what he and she and he said, I guess you can say I am way more impressed by deeds than endless blabbing. Anytime I open it due to being embedded in news articles and wanting to see detailed photo being shown, I see basically news/youtube/whatever shallow and pathetic comment section. Echo chambers. Weird dynamics which don't happen in real life.
Why would you do this to yourself? I mean if you are a balanced adult who knows what they want in life and are not affected by massive mood swings and insecurities for whatever reason.
It is of course not black and white, it seems that ie right now Ukrainian defenders have a very good platform to inform whole world, no need to have BBC/CNN guys embedded in the heart of bombed city. That's cool and all. I just really don't like the rest of the whole society evolved around it.
> if you are a[n]...adult who knows what they want in life
Twitter feeds directly into the modern impulse to define oneself. It becomes sticky by coupling that with social validation. Say the right thing and you get a few Internet Points. Do it enough and people may follow you, which gives you a different type of Internet Points. Get enough of those, and you might get a blue checkmark, denoting you as a Very Important Person.
It is much easier to lean on externally mediated processes of identity formation (like Twitter) than it is to go at it alone. I almost don't blame people, except for the fact that I don't believe this outsourcing of identity even works on an individual level. It's as if everyone present is playing along with a game that they don't fully believe in, but the game goes on despite that.
I post publicly on forums with my real name and don’t endorse everything I have said.
Just evict such absolutist moral nonsense people from your life and don’t allow them to control you. When you see them do it to others, block them.
It’s exactly the same thing as when it was a certain sort of church people controlling much of society with fear of “canceling” which was just done by different people with different means in the past, fundamentally nothing changed when people left religion because they thought religion was the source of this kind of toxicity.
When you get “canceled”, it doesn’t matter who you’ve personally “evicted” or not. If people with power over you either agree with the absolutists or are afraid of offending them, you’re going to have a bad time.
I think you're failing to account for the specifically viral nature of Twitter. Even a forum like reddit is a relatively isolated space for opprobrium by comparison.
It seems in their effort to ban people for wrong think, they banned the wrong group. They should have been banning the cancellers. "I don't engage on Twitter out of fear," is not a good sign for retention or growth numbers. Twitter seems to be killing itself by allowing this cancer to grow.
Have you ever been on a pretty great message board / forum and a bunch of spittle people join and makes the board suck to converse on? Eventually that board is nothing but spittle people, then the board dies. Twitters seems like it is going this way.
FWIW, I cancelled all my social media accounts after the Snowden revelations in 2013. I'm just an outside observer, but I'm certainly glad I'm not inside.
> it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say.
> People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink.
I totally get that this is the zeitgeist now (and I'm starting to behave this way now on HN since I don't really do other social media), but this is a horrible place we've worked ourselves into.
People taking pop shots and then getting algorithmically amplified has reduced the surface area for having safe dialogue and has led to increasing tensions and polarization.
In an ideal world, people talk about and discuss things they disagree about frequently and are at least respectful in dealing with those they don't see eye to eye with. We all have a different frame of reference, and that's not something to fight against.
I think the pandemic increased stresses for a lot of people (myself included), but these trends really took hold with algorithmic amplification. It isn't just a passing fad, sadly. And it isn't just rooted in just the technology. There are real needs and causes for social angst that need to be met.
Imagine if we also amplified inspiring and hopeful things. Nourished ourselves with stories of hope and overcoming difficulties. Science and technology, opportunity, a look to the future. (Especially for kids!) I know life isn't all sunshine and roses, but this would give us balance and perspective and wouldn't chip away at a person's inner drive and passion by replacing it with skepticism and dissatisfaction.
I think we can swing back. People are noticing this and feeling displeasure.
Unless u have a lot of followers, there is a 99.9% chance no one will even see your tweet. Almost all twitter engagement is just bot engagement. there are entire industries devoted to getting social media posts seen by humans. it isn't easy.
The actual poll seems to ask "ever used". I believe that 25% of Americans have every used Twitter. I believe the number is probably much higher since "ever used" could mean anything from tweeted to seen a tweet.
It is. The statistic the article is actually referencing is that ~25%, "use twitter"[0]. That most likely indicates they at least open Twitter. Another post from the same site, the article references, has the headline that about 10% of those create 80% of the content[1]. Bottom-line a fraction of 25% sometimes tweet.
Yeah, I have to use twitter sometimes to check for immediate status bulletins from certain companies. I just hold my nose, check their stream, and immediately exit.
And, of course, sometimes I accidently click on a link on HN that points to Twitter without realizing it, and I have to NOPE back out as fast as possible.
If that Pew Research survey is there only source (it's the one they link when they make the claim) it looks like 25% of Americans use twitter. But that doesn't mean that 25% actually makes tweets. It's probably possible to cross that with public twitter numbers on active tweeters, but I've heard 1% make 99% of the tweets before, and in my own experience that seems accurate.
Most people I know who use twitter use it to stay up to date with creators they care about.
I kept Twitter to "advertise" when I write technical blogs which I do very little of these days due to time.
I follow a bunch of tech type stuff I'm interested in, but honestly, it's become more of a place to vent and whine about this or that.
When I step back and look at it from afar, it's kinda what Facebook was when I left it a decade or so ago; people whining, and any subject worth commenting on is too controversial to do on the likes of Twitter where nuance is easily lost in so few characters.
I see no real need for me to be on Twitter anymore. I'm not on any other social networks aside from linkedin, which also seems to have lost its professional focus.
It is a sign of the trying times we live in that I saw the extra "z"s in your post and instead of assuming a typo, I immediately think of Russian hackers infiltrating this platform.
Hehe the truth is much less nefarious; I was typing this on mobile, my 2 year old was climbing on me as I type and my wife was calling us both to hurry up and get to the dinner table, or else!
Edit: and to explain why z's, it's exactly above the comma "," on my Android phone (Gboard), and it's easy to miss when you can't see!
While we're on the subject of things with horrible UX (Twitter), why is there no forward slash on GBoard as a long-press alternative but there is a backslash?!
Is there a link to a podcast or article that I'm missing? The authors throw out this big claim
> It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.
then follow it up with a couple disjointed statistics and then ends with
> The bottom line: Every current trend suggests politics will get more toxic before it normalizes. But the silent majority gives us hope beyond the nuttiness.
What?
The entire premise around how often people _send_ tweets also doesn't seem like a good foundation. Misinformation (to pick only one relevant thing about social) comes from _consuming_ media. The median user story is probably people skimming endless content (memes, news, etc.) not tweeting everything out.
This seems factually wrong? Maybe most independents are in between the two parties, but not all. Look at Bernie Sanders for example, I would say he's to the left of the Democratic party.
I thought maybe the Gallup poll they are referencing had a weird definition of an independent requiring it to be between the two parties, but I'm not seeing that either.
Aren't independents people who haven't declared any party affiliations? They are usually in the middle, but could have extreme Democrat or Republican views.
Many of the people I know who are independent (like myself) have strong views, and largely lean one way or the other, but hate the party anyway. I feel this way about the party I most closely align with. We share a lot, but I really don't care at all for how they go about things, or what they consider is the highest priority. So I'm an independent, but I don't want to be associated with them.
Is there any evidence for this, or even definition of this? I'd define it as swing voters who tend to mix up their ballot between the two parties, and I'd be surprised if the percentage of people who did that broke double digits.
That's my point, but the article says they are in the middle between Democrats and Republicans. They could be anywhere on the political spectrum, however.
Personally, I always read it as "advice" rather than as an insult. Unfortunately, can't seem to find much context for that quote so it's hard to determine what was intended.
The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.
"Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications."
What meanings or implications does the aphorism have other than "some people (fools in this case) shouldn't ever talk?"
We've established you think I've misinterpreted the aphorism and that you suspect there's something socially off with me, but we haven't established what you think the aphorism means. Go on, educate me.
This is why people like Queen Elizabeth (specifically, not the rest of the royal family) are widely held in such high regard. She rarely makes any comments about anything that could be discerned as political, and as a result she has stayed largely neutral. Even people like my dad, who is highly conservative and vocally dislikes all celbrities, still thinks she's a saint. I'm not convinced—she keeps her mouth shut because she's done for if she makes a fuss about anything.
I generally agree, though I don't think the "saintliness" even matters. The queen as seen by the public is probably a persona, sure, but so long as the persona stays put, she's a symbol of stability, and that is the whole point of the monarchy.
This even shows up in tech - Bill Gates isn't exactly known for widespread political opinions, and while we all know he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
Meanwhile, you've got Elon, who I think would be reasonably similar - if he could stay the hell off Twitter and stop overpromising so goddamn often. He could have ended up as a symbol for the commercial space revolution and the surge of EV popularity, but instead he's polarising and often hated.
Generally, polarisation isn't great for authority figures. Even in politics this is sort of true - relatively centrist parties often have broader appeal than extreme views. (Though because politicians are our means of changing things, there's also an aversion to politicians with no opinions at all.)
>he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
You probably haven't been following Gates lately. His reputation has tarnished in the last couple of years.
There are people who are adamant Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the Earth through COVID-19 or something. They're wrong, but people do believe that.
I don't really like this quote. Lots of smart people often explain that they ask "stupid" questions and that it's important to get over your shame of being stupid. Questions change you from having a passive role to an active role in understanding. Maybe making the difference between "questions" and "commentary" would be a useful start?
I once worked for a company where several groups were VERY vocal about their complaints about each other. It seemed like bitching about the other team(s) was part of the job. Lots of walls built here and there between teams.
I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them.
After I established relationships with various folks across the groups, I had folks from every team come to me / were available to me in ways they never would for each other.
My job was 2x easier as far as getting help / information / cooperation compared to the folks complaining non stop.
There were groups I agreed with / disagreed with (one group was straight wrong about nearly everything), but throwing a fit just made for worse relationships.
I still made suggestions to folks whose job it was to manage these groups, politely, gently, often quietly, but if they did or did not fix it / repeating myself wasn't a big focus for me.
I've long since given up on right and wrong (well outside real moral issues) and more about how to get to the end as best as possible with the relationships / people available.
Familiar story. Worse when the group that's wrong on nearly everything gets a cozy position from people in charge, where they can get by with minimum effort.
> right and wrong (well outside real moral issues)
Even moral issues don't have objective right and wrong. The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous, and without fully understanding each others priors arguments about ethics are rarely productive.
I call this employing tactical empathy and it is the single most important soft skill I learned. It's the only, only effective way to do cross-team coordination, arguably all the way up to C-level to C-level.
Assuming we're using a shared definition of polite, I disagree!
> having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.
You can be polite while not facilitating the counterparty in a way that's useful to you but in the short term feels like you're giving up something. People often can't get past that temporary feeling of losing so they don't venture into it.
Was being a bit tongue in cheek, but yes, it depends on your definition of politeness. I’d argue that being genuinely polite, ie being genuinely respectful and considerate, involves the kind of self sacrifice you’re describing. But I also agree that when most people imagine politeness, they imagine what I’d call “superficial politeness”, not “genuine politeness”
I only recently discovered something that is probably obvious to most other people: someone’s immediate verbal reaction to a message is often different than their long-term behavioural response to it.
“Your team isn’t pulling their weight”
The immediate reaction might be “Yes of course we are, how dare you!”
Now you have two options. It sounds like they have rejected your premise. Do you double down and try to force a verbal capitulation? “No, you are all really doing nothing!”
Or do you leave the seed you have planted: “Oh, alright then, good to hear it.”
The second option works way better. What they said in their immediate reaction is not predictive of the longer-term response. The longer term reaction might be that the team quietly increases their performance. If you went the confrontational approach, you would have ruled that out.
Not really. Anyone can open their mouth. The challenge of "moving up the ladder" is in leveraging your resources (which might include your voice) to provide value to people who can help you. Most of these value exchanges do not happen on Twitter or even in public. Besides, how do you even quantify the series of events that leads someone to (for example) an Ivy League university, a job at McKinsey, a private equity firm, and eventually the top echelon of a company? There is a lot more to this than "opening your mouth" – in fact, "closing your mouth" is probably a better representation of the soft skills required for corporate success than "opening" it.
I bet if you tallied the executives of F500 companies, you would find a vast majority of them do not have a blog, or even a Twitter. And of those that do, you'd find most of them using it as an explicit asset (e.g. a VC tweeting for "thought leadership" that increases dealflow, a CSO building an audience to sell to, etc.). You will not find many of them tweeting personal political opinions, certainly none outside of the orthodoxy.
IMO, it's a miscalculation even to post thoughts aligned with the orthodoxy — you don't know how the environment will change. Five years from now, maybe we'll be cancelling all the people doing the cancelling today.
How do you think recruiters will find you if you dont self promote. How do you think you will compete with others in the same org when you dont talk about your achievements. Even best products and services needs great marketing to suceed. When you can talk about F500 executives, you should know that the auto company valued most in the world is run by a twitter troll thriving on attention and promotion.
What you talk about is what I would prefer the world to be, but the reality is everything depends on marketing and especially marketing in social media.
Definitely, these two things are about two different kinds of statement though. One which directly affects you, where voicing will dramatically improve your situation. The second type of statement is where you discuss something as a hobby, which might not affect you or your close ones, and where you are under informed, and have little to gain personally, while running the full risk of offending someone.
There's a reason why "...and the wisdom to know the difference" is the end of the serenity prayer.
In the end it's the crux of the whole thing. Is [X terrible thing] something that's like the weather, something that it's useless to yell at? Or is it something like climate change, also nearly useless to yell at, but with enough fighting and unity we could actually make a difference? And the answer for any really difficult question is going to be an hard one, no pithy saying will tell it to you.
(Though, agreed, far too much shouting is of the irrelevant, angry, useless kind.)
Most online discussions regarding divisive political topics are unwinnable (mind made up, bad faith discussion) and more importantly...inconsequential.
When I was young someone told me something similar (but not exactly the same) - "imagine you have a zip on your mouth and you have to unzip it before speaking". The point was not the zip, but to take the time to think before speaking rather than just saying the first thing that pops into your head.
Social media not only removes that moment of reflection, but it actually spreads explosive verbal diarrhoea. The commercial platforms are incentivised to encourage conflict and divisiveness because it drives traffic therefore profits. If everyone was encouraged to be nice and friendly on social media, people wouldn't spend as much time on it, so less eyeballs on ads and less profit.
I don't think that is the complete picture though. Having spent some time on alternative platforms that don't have the profit motive, I have noticed there is still a tendency for many people to be slightly outrageous, presumably simply because it attracts more engagement, and those sort of people like the attention. Say something sensible and you're not going to get loads of people replying "I agree", so after spending a lot of time writing sensible comments you end up wondering if anyone has actually even read them and you start to think - what's the point?
I wonder how (or even whether) you could design a platform that encourages sensible and penalises outrage.
I think there's a lesson to be learned from this wisdom, but putting yourself out there, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes is invaluable.
I would rather reveal my ignorance or say the occasional dumb thing than remain bogged down by my own ignorance or stupidity because I adhere to some proverbs about silence that I read on the internet. Making those mistakes is how I grow.
I don't want to take away from your post but you are copy and pasting it all over the place in every thread that mentions twitter or social media... That's against the rules of the site.
The most active social media users are usually people lacking in real life.
Think about it, if you have a great job, a great partner and a great life, are you on Twitter arguing 20 to 30 hours a week.
The type of person to argue with strangers all day has none of the above.
It's also a matter of recognizing how insignificant we all are. No one cares what I think.
Hopefully no one ever will. I do want to create games and music for people to enjoy, but if I then start mouthing off about how taxes are evil I hope I'm ignored.
This feels oddly specific. I'm not sure why you can't engage on Twitter and still not be "lacking in real life." Who even gets to define "real life?" And while I'm sure some people spend 20-30 hours per week on Twitter I'm guessing it's such a small percentage of the world that it might as well be statistically insignificant.
> I'm guessing it's such a small percentage of the world that it might as well be statistically insignificant.
Exactly! The vast majority of content on social media is produced by a vanishingly small slice of the world's population. The views expressed should not be understood as representative.
> This feels oddly specific. I'm not sure why you can't engage on Twitter and still not be "lacking in real life."
It all depends on your definition of "engaging on Twitter". People reading their compiled follow lists and occasionally posting a thing or two are one thing, and that's definitely doable without "lacking in real life". But I struggle to imagine how one can spend 20-30 hours a week engaging in wild debates on twitter and not "lack in real life".
I've noticed similar tendencies in myself recently, but with Discord instead of Twitter. After doing some prolonged soul-searching, I found that to be one of the main reasons.
At the very least is a workable hypothesis. To be active on Twitter one needs the right personality, which means being very upset when other people reply/engage or being indifferent and playing one of the games adults are playing. In the first case, the person is not able to avoid engaging. In the second case, they engage because they have the usual "motives".
Twitter is a very dangerous social media. I consider myself a wordly and experienced person, but I admit I tend to over-value what is shared on Twitter (momentarily, because I look back occasionally at bookmarks and I have very little or no memories of those tweets or I cannot understand why I bookmarked them).
I over-value (and not properly value) because I have no clue who is the person who's tweeting (case 1, why should I listen to them? Who are they? Would the same observation "hold" is a face to face conversation?) or I know them/they are public figures (case 2), and they are playing a game of popularity or relevance in which I am, as part of the audience, the sucker.
Just to make an example, the other day someone wrote that "the US should ramp up oil production now". I read it and I told myself "Ok". A reply-guy replied "what are you talking about, this is not like software, when you can "easily" scale up the number of servers". And I thought, man, I was really not thinking, my first reaction when reading a twitter should be "this is bs, who is this person, where is the competence coming from, what it the game they are playing now", but it was not my first reaction, which was instead of passive acceptance.
Dangerous game.
Not to mention, you can't even express this thought on twitter. Way too many characters.
I think the character limit creates a blunt form of communication that leads to this toxic environment. It is practically designed to create misunderstandings and dismissive short responses to those misunderstandings.
this is not my experience at all. All the people who were popular in high school and who have a very active social life are also the most prolific twitter users.
There are two groups – people you describe (who have no life and spend 8 hours a day on Twitter) and people who have made a career out of being a social media personality. Most online spaces today are simply a series of weird interactions between these two groups with the "normal" user stuck in the middle.
So a lot of artists post works they've done, and are open for commissions, and post the commissioned art or a retweet to the commissioner's account. This is marketing I guess but not what I typically think of as "fake PR" or "here's a notification of our service with a teaser of content" type of marketing
This question needs to be asked more often. It took me quite a while to realize why I'm more engaged on Twitter than I used to be.
In my case, it's to have a conversation. Before I moved to the United States, I could have all sorts of conversations with people at work, no matter how controversial or stupid or weird. But in the US, the culture is different. There are things that you can't discuss with your coworkers, for various reasons.
When the pandemic hit and I stopped going to the office, that made the problem even worse. Sure, I didn't have any real friends here, but at least there was more randomness and diversity in my social life. I love my family, but it's an extremely limited pool of people to talk to.
So I found myself participating more and more on Twitter, on Imgur, and on certain game forums. Which, in turn, had the same impact on me as Facebook used to before I closed my account.
My own, very personal conclusion, is that the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them, making them turn to social networks to fill the void left by the absence of what used to be normal, every day way to socialize.
Then again, I'm just a sample of one, so my conclusion is almost certain to be wrong.
> the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them
Is that unique to the US? It feels like something broadly true if I believe what I see in the news and online forums, but in my personal life it does not feel true at all.
I can't say whether it's unique to the US, because I've only lived in two other countries before moving here. Also, I've spent all these years since I moved to the US living in the same county of the same state, a state so notorious for how hard it is to make friends, that there's a name for the phenomenon: Seattle Freeze.
On the other hand, I've talked to a lot of other immigrants who lived in different states before this, and the general consensus (in that admittedly small sample) is that the US is definitely different from South America or Europe in that sense.
For context, I lived in Chile before I moved to the US, and Chile is the country in South America that tries the hardest to be like the US. Even in Chile, it's easier to have a richer social life than here, despite longer working hours and longer commutes, which both result in having much less free time. My own theory is because you get to socialize more at work and, if you have a kid that goes to kindergarten or school, with other parents. Here? "Not so much" would be an understatement.
Not that many people I know use Twitter at all, the place seems overly toxic and whenever I see a thread or tweet it's usually terrible stuff with terrible comments attached to it.
Many people whose articles and projects get regularly posted here only have Twitter listed as the means of contact on their personal webpages. Wish they offered another contact as well.
I've tried to curate my activity, followings and topics to have a nicer experience. Like Google News, the curation works well, but slowly degrades in a few weeks until I'm seeing thing I'm not interested in, but their algorithms say people tend to engage with (mostly sports, celebrities, politics).
Twitter is specially annoying because it constantly probes you, be it with irrelevant posts to see if you like them, and asking you to confirm what topics you like or dislike. At least it includes a disclaimer when it's doing that.
twtter has about 70 million US users, out of a population of 330 million (does twitter have an age cutoff for users?). One would presume that twitter is like other services, where a small percentage of the user base is producing a larger percentage of the content.
So 'most people don't tweet' isn't really that much of a stretch.
The shocking story is that 25% of Americans tweet. As a non-tweeter, I would have assumed that number was more like 1-5%. 25% sounds pretty representative to me.
I'm annoyed by how this story seems to be jamming together unrelated things to paint a picture. Are people under the impression that twitter users are big political donors, or that twitter users don't mostly self-identify as independents? Are [capital-I]ndependents "somewhere in the middle," or is that just editorial trying to turn 42% of people into centrist charity-givers?
Most independents are not really 'in the middle', however much they may be disillusioned with existing party structures. They tend to lean one way or the other. I'm fairly liberal, but strongly anti-partisan (I've never belonged to a party). I think shrinking party affiliation is a good thing.
I agree. I also think that twitter reflects that. The vast majority of political twitter claims to be independent. Axios is doing a thing that centrists do often, which is to equivocate between independents, "swing voters" and centrists in order to make themselves a silent plurality.
While I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020, I AM a political independent who doesn't always vote for the Democratic candidate, either. And this notion that roughly 50% of voters are quasi hate criminals is abhorrent.
It's always, "Oh, I suppose it's okay if you vote for the wrong party, as long as your candidate is no actual threat to my own ideology. But <most recent Presidential nominee> is just going too far." Except that partisans have been saying this same thing about "<latest Presidential nominee>" for at least 50 years now.
This mindset is absurd, and only proves the author's premise about suggesting an isolated bubble.
> But a lot of them voted for a really terrible President
In fairness, the media did a really good job making the low gas prices, low inflation, low taxes, record low illegal border crossings, well-handled foreign policy, and record breaking speedy vaccine development of the last administration somehow seem like the most evil thing ever, so a misled public can’t really be blamed too much for who they voted into office now.
I think more than anything they were just tired of hearing about it so they voted for the current guy for a little media break.
In analyzing my personal motivations and looking at "common sense" knowledge and psych research on the topic, I've come to the conclusion that we gain a lot of motivational energy from others. We live in worlds of stories and narratives, and those narratives are strengthened when mirrored and shared by others. If someone notices or sees my work or praises me for my work, it is a strong signal to my brain that it's on the right track.
It was embarrassing for me to admit this, but I've found it to be a running thread throughout my educational and work career. I suspect it dominates my brain more because of early childhood experiences more, but I'm unsure because it seems taboo to admit to craving acceptance or acknowledgement.
Once I began admitting it to myself, it became a big part of what drives my growth. I now know the impact that accountability has on my success. I'd rather feel slightly embarrassed for wanting people to see my toy projects than limit my personal trajectory out of fear. I am mindful of depending on others for validation, and I try to strike a healthy balance between wanting to impress others and wanting to impress myself.
Apropos to the topic at hand, I'm using Twitter and Observable to "learn in public". I don't expect or intend to become an influencer. I just know that I can leverage the dopamine hits of upvotes and likes and retweets for my personal growth. I'm a social animal that needs to have his efforts directed through shared structures of meaning. So far, I've leveraged that in multiple areas to great effect.
I'm kind of the same way, but I don't have a Twitter account, and haven't really ever had one. I have a private chat server with other people who make things and share them with each other. It's tacitly understood that we support each other's work and provide constructive feedback. Not to mention emojis. It's nice, gives me the brain chemicals I need, and I don't need to get exposed to Twitter. So, if you are hesitant about Twitter for any other reason, I'm here to say that you can learn in public without it.
That's a great lower-stakes way to approach it. I turned to Twitter because of the threading and big computer science community.
I think the vital part is the aspect of accountability. Even just committing to updating a friend on progress and asking them to keep you to your word helps. I've found it hard to get people to do that work because it sometimes requires shifting from "friend" to "boss" mode. I don't really think it's fair to put my loved ones in that position lol
I wish someone would go around interviewing reporters like this writer and ask "How long did it take for you to realize that Twitter is not real life? Why do you think you were mislead for so long? How do you plan to avoid similar errors in judgement in the future?"
Except the social status journos have make this like of inquiry uncouth. It is someone both one of the most pressing issues of our media landscape, yet seen as a simple-minded and undignified perspective that sophisticated media won't touch.
I thought this was fairly well understood that these communities follow some sort of Pareto ratio where a minority of people churn out most of the content, or are responsible for sending content to the top of feeds. I recall reading about it with regards to Twitter and Reddit, and it probably applies in some form or another with every social network that allows for passive participants.
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[ 0.44 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadI think it’s a bubble that should not have any political power, because it’s a cesspool!
Stop following people who post political things or opinions about social issues and the toxicity is much, much less.
I sometimes see posts that I like and want to retweet but I don't because it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say. It's not worth the risk.
People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink. So it's best for me to avoid it entirely.
I don't use Twitter or pretty much say anything publicly for the same reason, but note that this is definitely a risk for people of all demographics.
If you have a minority viewpoint, you get attacked far more easily.
Right now or at any point in the future. People have been canceled for things they said many years and opinion changes ago.
We have gone from silencing the minority to silencing the majority, this is terrible, but silver lining is that now maybe more people are invested in solving the problem.
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!
Case in point: James Gunn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gunn#Firing_from_Disney_... )
This is why I rarely interact on Twitter and I have a script that deletes all my tweets that are over X days old. If I say something truely insightful, I'll just make a blog post out of it.
Yep, he's super cancelled. Great example.
A good person who doesn't use Twitter (someone who might fix cars, or works on a fishing vessel for example) who is having this little discussion about what is "good" and "ok" might very easily use the wrong words and offend someone.
That’s the real problem: the standards of “good” and “decent” shift from time to time. What is fine today may get you canceled tomorrow.
Thus, it is not safe to put your opinions out there in any form that could come back to bite you. If you want to take that risk, fine. But do not pretend that it is safe.
It's not easy as "hurt" is not objective, is relative to others and no longer connected to intention.
But you might not care about that. You might say that I'm arguing in bad faith, or that your words couldn't possibly have offended me. But you don't get to redefine it.
Obviously, you might just not care that you've just offended me. That's what bad people do. You aren't a bad person, right? Could you please apologize?
This is an unfair question, not because it's not a reasonable one given your argument, but because if you say 'yes' I can't take you seriously.
Of course, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the response is when people are offended. I can certainly modify my language and behavior to reduce the chances of offending someone. I can even apologize when I've accidentally put my foot in my mouth.
Twitter lacks the tolerance and nuance for either of those scenarios, though. If something 'not ok' is said, what was intended or meant doesn't matter (and any nuanced is typically ignored). An apology isn't seen as an apology for a mistake, but as an admission of guilt of being a terrible person who doesn't deserve oxygen.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/soap/
> Though the show’s ratings were still good in season four, ABC cancelled the series because of continued pressure from the so-called “moral majority.” By the end of the series, Vlasic pickles was the only advertiser interested in advertising on the series. In They’ll Never Put That on the Air, executive producer Paul Junger Witt said, “We weren’t killed by a fearful network. The network had been incredibly supportive. We had been doing this long enough to understand that they were in a business, and they sat down and showed us — dollar for dollar — why they couldn’t afford to do it anymore.”
The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
More like people who complain about being victim of the cancel culture are the ones who were oblivious to it until they became the victim. Currently the cancel culture is being associated as some kind of PC culture outcome but it originated way before. The push back or critisim against it seems to be only happening now.
In many scenarios canceling is completely arbitrary, based on misquotes, lack of context, or total fabrication simply because someone, somewhere was offended and can get other people to act on their behalf.
In the best case scenario, the person being canceled is actually a shitty human being. I know such a person. He said some really stupid stuff online, was called out on it, doubled down on it, was doxxed and canceled. He's not the type of person who considers the consequences of his actions in any scenario. He's also actually stupid and not a friend of mine. I think he's as close to hot garbage as a human being can get without actually abusing or murdering other people.
However, this person still did not deserve death threats for the words he wrote. This person did not deserve people calling his employer threatening to burn down their building. The employer certainly didn't deserve that. His coworkers didn't deserve it. This person did not deserve his house to be vandalized; nor did the actual owner of the house. His roommates didn't deserve to live in fear and to have to deal with angry people maybe thinking they were him.
These behaviors are not justifiable. They are, in fact, less justifiable than someone saying awful things online. Writing them off as "consequences" is simply twisted.
Choose to believe it or not, that's your business, but this is exactly what happened.
(I do believe you. By comment was in response to your original one, which lacked a lot of the context you just provided.)
There's enough pile-on mobs on Twitter now with enough disagreement on what's acceptable that you can trip over any of them.
"You just used 'OK' in your comment, only white supremacists use 'OK'."
"He has a racist smirk"
I remember(maybe mis-) some reddit comments at the time about the kid's smirk. There was also a buch of comments about "punchable face"
https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...
>In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O'Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by "2020fight" as the one that "helped frame the news cycle" of the previous days, and characterized the video as a "deliberate attempt" to mislead and "manipulate the public conversation on Twitter"—a violation of Twitter rules.[76] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story.
To add to my point of 'OK': On January 22, shortly after tweeting it, comedian Kathy Griffin deleted a Twitter message in which she accused Covington basketball players making an OK gesture of "throwing up the new nazi sign".
heres one link. search term is covington kid.
basically just another case of left aligned news stations casually labelling everyone they don't like as 'racist'
Someone edited down a video of what happened and shared it. It was boosted either by bots or by unsuspecting people but it set off what can only be described as a witch hunt. This is of course not the first time this has happened, we have had things like Donglegate(https://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/03/donglegate-is-classic-...) and Shirtgate(https://time.com/3589392/comet-shirt-storm/). But the events seem to be getting bigger in magnitude, i.e. drawing in international media(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46935701) and more numerous(sorry no stats, only my attention).
You can not run a society on mobs. I am not sure if it is Twitters design, the speed of information, the need to feel like part of the in group and/or a combination of all and more that is leading to the formation of mobs but it is not healthy.
I also think there is some cultural values at play as well, where the number of Twitter followers, being an influencer, or just being self centered is seen as a positive thing.
Part of me thinks that it might be related to the gamification of everything, if I post more more(of the right thing) I get more likes, followers, retweets by celebrity. Rather than if I post clear concise or well thought out things. Quality over quantity as it were.
Just like you're getting downvotes and a lot of blowback for your opinion on this matter here, it's way worse on twitter.
I've heard someone say that twitter is a game where the goal is not to be the main character of the day. And that kind of holds. Twitter is a bit geared for outrage. Small snippets with no context. Say you don't like The Batman and you could find yourself under a barrage of hate and vitriol. It's not a left thing or a right thing, they both have their mobs on twitter, in addition to all the other random mobs floating about. Hell, say something shitty about the wrong product will have that mob after you.
if you say internet communities have an issue with pile on mobs and harassment, id agree but i think that's different then canceling, which i don't think happens to the average person or they even need to worry about
Is banning cancelling? What about HN's rate limiting? Being harrassed off of a platform?
All these things have been called "cancelling" by someone. And fair play by others. I think, in this context, we do have to consider the mobs as a part of "cancelling" because this is a thread about an article about people who don't engage in social media. Partly due to the fear of the amount of negative engagement.
I think you've really highlighted here why there's so much backlash against the latest wave of political correctness.
To many people, myself included, a "good person" is someone who can be counted on to help a friend in need, goes out of their way to make the day of the people they interact with that little bit more special (this is something I need to work on), and works hard to provide for their family in whatever way they can.
In my experience at least, a lot of the people who say the right words and hold the right opinions will flake on a friend in their hour of need, or avoid speaking with certain kinds of people lest they say the wrong thing. On the contrary, I can name several people who have dark senses of humour or right-wing beliefs, but will always go above and beyond to help out their community and the people they care about (yes, LGBT people and ethnic minorities too!).
I'm not saying that PC people are worse than non-PC people (if anything, it's probably uncorrelated), but the fact that you've binned people into "good" and "bad" based on how PC their opinions are is just, at least in my opinion, completely out of step with the view of general society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30602611
I would reiterate my comment on that thread, verbatim:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603008
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-32703071
Very few people spoke there, and very little of what they said was distributed beyond Hyde Park or recorded for posterity. I'm lucky enough to have seen a couple of people speak there, and they were both rather... eccentric. And even they didn't stand there all day, every day giving their opinions on everything that happened.
I don’t believe in living in fear of how people might react.
Of course I choose my battles; and I don’t walk up to strangers and tell them their baby is ugly. But that’s not being suppressed, IMHO.
And I don’t keep narrow-minded people among my close friends.
This is very common on Twitter. It's not a place I can haphazardly navigate. I can't stay up to date on the latest outrage or who has fallen from glory.
It doesn't matter what their views are. If someone decides they don't like them and that person have enough followers, they will find something.
That's an insane premise, but even if we presume it to be true, it still doesn't cover the case of _future_ cancellation when someone finds your tweets 10 years later and decides they aged like milk.
There are many comments I would have made 5-10 years ago, that I wouldn't make today. Sure, that's mostly due to maturity, but I've also adjusted my self-filter to account for a changing environment and audience.
At this point, I write all political comments under pseudonyms. It's not because I'm scared of getting cancelled — on the contrary, I wish I could argue my positions from my real name. But there is a lot of risk, for little benefit – I'm not a "journalist" or blogger or anyone with a career that depends on my political viewpoints. So why bother?
In general, online political comments gain me nothing, and there is no way to predict how those comments might look in a week, month, or even years from now. I do still write plenty of them, under pseudonyms (like this one), but it's more of a hobby to practice my writing. But I'm also not ashamed of anything I've written under any of the accounts – I would gladly defend all my opinions in person (to those close to me, who already know my feelings, and – btw, because they're sane – have never "cancelled" me).
Who knows, maybe one day I'll even tweet my pseudonym usernames so I can show everyone how right I was five years ago.
I can’t even risk having people see who I follow, and on Twitter who you follow is public.
Turns out, there's a lot of stuff people just probably shouldn't broadcast.
To illustrate this: imagine your ideal day. It could be on vacation, or hanging out at home, anywhere really. The key: imagine you are happy, or at least content. Now, do your imaginings ever have you reading angry tweets by people you hardly know for longer than you'd like?
I'd guess not.
Not sure how you could do that job without Twitter.
Why would you do this to yourself? I mean if you are a balanced adult who knows what they want in life and are not affected by massive mood swings and insecurities for whatever reason.
It is of course not black and white, it seems that ie right now Ukrainian defenders have a very good platform to inform whole world, no need to have BBC/CNN guys embedded in the heart of bombed city. That's cool and all. I just really don't like the rest of the whole society evolved around it.
Twitter feeds directly into the modern impulse to define oneself. It becomes sticky by coupling that with social validation. Say the right thing and you get a few Internet Points. Do it enough and people may follow you, which gives you a different type of Internet Points. Get enough of those, and you might get a blue checkmark, denoting you as a Very Important Person.
It is much easier to lean on externally mediated processes of identity formation (like Twitter) than it is to go at it alone. I almost don't blame people, except for the fact that I don't believe this outsourcing of identity even works on an individual level. It's as if everyone present is playing along with a game that they don't fully believe in, but the game goes on despite that.
It's quite modern and tragicomic in a way.
Just evict such absolutist moral nonsense people from your life and don’t allow them to control you. When you see them do it to others, block them.
It’s exactly the same thing as when it was a certain sort of church people controlling much of society with fear of “canceling” which was just done by different people with different means in the past, fundamentally nothing changed when people left religion because they thought religion was the source of this kind of toxicity.
It seems in their effort to ban people for wrong think, they banned the wrong group. They should have been banning the cancellers. "I don't engage on Twitter out of fear," is not a good sign for retention or growth numbers. Twitter seems to be killing itself by allowing this cancer to grow.
Have you ever been on a pretty great message board / forum and a bunch of spittle people join and makes the board suck to converse on? Eventually that board is nothing but spittle people, then the board dies. Twitters seems like it is going this way.
FWIW, I cancelled all my social media accounts after the Snowden revelations in 2013. I'm just an outside observer, but I'm certainly glad I'm not inside.
> it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say.
> People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink.
I totally get that this is the zeitgeist now (and I'm starting to behave this way now on HN since I don't really do other social media), but this is a horrible place we've worked ourselves into.
People taking pop shots and then getting algorithmically amplified has reduced the surface area for having safe dialogue and has led to increasing tensions and polarization.
In an ideal world, people talk about and discuss things they disagree about frequently and are at least respectful in dealing with those they don't see eye to eye with. We all have a different frame of reference, and that's not something to fight against.
I think the pandemic increased stresses for a lot of people (myself included), but these trends really took hold with algorithmic amplification. It isn't just a passing fad, sadly. And it isn't just rooted in just the technology. There are real needs and causes for social angst that need to be met.
Imagine if we also amplified inspiring and hopeful things. Nourished ourselves with stories of hope and overcoming difficulties. Science and technology, opportunity, a look to the future. (Especially for kids!) I know life isn't all sunshine and roses, but this would give us balance and perspective and wouldn't chip away at a person's inner drive and passion by replacing it with skepticism and dissatisfaction.
I think we can swing back. People are noticing this and feeling displeasure.
Good decision.
To win the social media game it is to not play it at all.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
And, of course, sometimes I accidently click on a link on HN that points to Twitter without realizing it, and I have to NOPE back out as fast as possible.
Most people I know who use twitter use it to stay up to date with creators they care about.
I follow a bunch of tech type stuff I'm interested in, but honestly, it's become more of a place to vent and whine about this or that.
When I step back and look at it from afar, it's kinda what Facebook was when I left it a decade or so ago; people whining, and any subject worth commenting on is too controversial to do on the likes of Twitter where nuance is easily lost in so few characters.
I see no real need for me to be on Twitter anymore. I'm not on any other social networks aside from linkedin, which also seems to have lost its professional focus.
Edit: and to explain why z's, it's exactly above the comma "," on my Android phone (Gboard), and it's easy to miss when you can't see!
> It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.
then follow it up with a couple disjointed statistics and then ends with
> The bottom line: Every current trend suggests politics will get more toxic before it normalizes. But the silent majority gives us hope beyond the nuttiness.
What?
The entire premise around how often people _send_ tweets also doesn't seem like a good foundation. Misinformation (to pick only one relevant thing about social) comes from _consuming_ media. The median user story is probably people skimming endless content (memes, news, etc.) not tweeting everything out.
This seems factually wrong? Maybe most independents are in between the two parties, but not all. Look at Bernie Sanders for example, I would say he's to the left of the Democratic party.
I thought maybe the Gallup poll they are referencing had a weird definition of an independent requiring it to be between the two parties, but I'm not seeing that either.
Is there any evidence for this, or even definition of this? I'd define it as swing voters who tend to mix up their ballot between the two parties, and I'd be surprised if the percentage of people who did that broke double digits.
Words my Dad taught me as I was growing up, but only really sank in the last 5 or so years ago.
> It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
But I read the quote as essentially saying:
"You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
But maybe some people don't take it that way.
The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.
What meanings or implications does the aphorism have other than "some people (fools in this case) shouldn't ever talk?"
We've established you think I've misinterpreted the aphorism and that you suspect there's something socially off with me, but we haven't established what you think the aphorism means. Go on, educate me.
This even shows up in tech - Bill Gates isn't exactly known for widespread political opinions, and while we all know he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
Meanwhile, you've got Elon, who I think would be reasonably similar - if he could stay the hell off Twitter and stop overpromising so goddamn often. He could have ended up as a symbol for the commercial space revolution and the surge of EV popularity, but instead he's polarising and often hated.
Generally, polarisation isn't great for authority figures. Even in politics this is sort of true - relatively centrist parties often have broader appeal than extreme views. (Though because politicians are our means of changing things, there's also an aversion to politicians with no opinions at all.)
You probably haven't been following Gates lately. His reputation has tarnished in the last couple of years.
2. Divorce
3. Melinda hinting that 1. had something to do with 2.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffr...
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundat...
I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them.
After I established relationships with various folks across the groups, I had folks from every team come to me / were available to me in ways they never would for each other.
My job was 2x easier as far as getting help / information / cooperation compared to the folks complaining non stop.
There were groups I agreed with / disagreed with (one group was straight wrong about nearly everything), but throwing a fit just made for worse relationships.
I still made suggestions to folks whose job it was to manage these groups, politely, gently, often quietly, but if they did or did not fix it / repeating myself wasn't a big focus for me.
I've long since given up on right and wrong (well outside real moral issues) and more about how to get to the end as best as possible with the relationships / people available.
Even moral issues don't have objective right and wrong. The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous, and without fully understanding each others priors arguments about ethics are rarely productive.
Sexual abuse of toddlers?
Unprovoked abduction and torture?
I think there certainly are base moral facts at the extremes of behaviour. Evil exists. Malevolence exists.
But I agree that most behaviour isn’t so extreme as to be easily judged without the understanding you describe.
> having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.
You can be polite while not facilitating the counterparty in a way that's useful to you but in the short term feels like you're giving up something. People often can't get past that temporary feeling of losing so they don't venture into it.
“Your team isn’t pulling their weight”
The immediate reaction might be “Yes of course we are, how dare you!”
Now you have two options. It sounds like they have rejected your premise. Do you double down and try to force a verbal capitulation? “No, you are all really doing nothing!”
Or do you leave the seed you have planted: “Oh, alright then, good to hear it.”
The second option works way better. What they said in their immediate reaction is not predictive of the longer-term response. The longer term reaction might be that the team quietly increases their performance. If you went the confrontational approach, you would have ruled that out.
I bet if you tallied the executives of F500 companies, you would find a vast majority of them do not have a blog, or even a Twitter. And of those that do, you'd find most of them using it as an explicit asset (e.g. a VC tweeting for "thought leadership" that increases dealflow, a CSO building an audience to sell to, etc.). You will not find many of them tweeting personal political opinions, certainly none outside of the orthodoxy.
IMO, it's a miscalculation even to post thoughts aligned with the orthodoxy — you don't know how the environment will change. Five years from now, maybe we'll be cancelling all the people doing the cancelling today.
What you talk about is what I would prefer the world to be, but the reality is everything depends on marketing and especially marketing in social media.
In the end it's the crux of the whole thing. Is [X terrible thing] something that's like the weather, something that it's useless to yell at? Or is it something like climate change, also nearly useless to yell at, but with enough fighting and unity we could actually make a difference? And the answer for any really difficult question is going to be an hard one, no pithy saying will tell it to you.
(Though, agreed, far too much shouting is of the irrelevant, angry, useless kind.)
—A Russian (or Italian) saying
(works either way, as it turns out)
The outcome doesn't matter, so it's time wasted.
That’s a big if :)
Most of us usually forget to think about that before opening our mouths.
Social media not only removes that moment of reflection, but it actually spreads explosive verbal diarrhoea. The commercial platforms are incentivised to encourage conflict and divisiveness because it drives traffic therefore profits. If everyone was encouraged to be nice and friendly on social media, people wouldn't spend as much time on it, so less eyeballs on ads and less profit.
I don't think that is the complete picture though. Having spent some time on alternative platforms that don't have the profit motive, I have noticed there is still a tendency for many people to be slightly outrageous, presumably simply because it attracts more engagement, and those sort of people like the attention. Say something sensible and you're not going to get loads of people replying "I agree", so after spending a lot of time writing sensible comments you end up wondering if anyone has actually even read them and you start to think - what's the point?
I wonder how (or even whether) you could design a platform that encourages sensible and penalises outrage.
My uncle taught me that one.
I would rather reveal my ignorance or say the occasional dumb thing than remain bogged down by my own ignorance or stupidity because I adhere to some proverbs about silence that I read on the internet. Making those mistakes is how I grow.
Think about it, if you have a great job, a great partner and a great life, are you on Twitter arguing 20 to 30 hours a week.
The type of person to argue with strangers all day has none of the above.
It's also a matter of recognizing how insignificant we all are. No one cares what I think.
Hopefully no one ever will. I do want to create games and music for people to enjoy, but if I then start mouthing off about how taxes are evil I hope I'm ignored.
Exactly! The vast majority of content on social media is produced by a vanishingly small slice of the world's population. The views expressed should not be understood as representative.
It all depends on your definition of "engaging on Twitter". People reading their compiled follow lists and occasionally posting a thing or two are one thing, and that's definitely doable without "lacking in real life". But I struggle to imagine how one can spend 20-30 hours a week engaging in wild debates on twitter and not "lack in real life".
I've noticed similar tendencies in myself recently, but with Discord instead of Twitter. After doing some prolonged soul-searching, I found that to be one of the main reasons.
Twitter is a very dangerous social media. I consider myself a wordly and experienced person, but I admit I tend to over-value what is shared on Twitter (momentarily, because I look back occasionally at bookmarks and I have very little or no memories of those tweets or I cannot understand why I bookmarked them). I over-value (and not properly value) because I have no clue who is the person who's tweeting (case 1, why should I listen to them? Who are they? Would the same observation "hold" is a face to face conversation?) or I know them/they are public figures (case 2), and they are playing a game of popularity or relevance in which I am, as part of the audience, the sucker.
Just to make an example, the other day someone wrote that "the US should ramp up oil production now". I read it and I told myself "Ok". A reply-guy replied "what are you talking about, this is not like software, when you can "easily" scale up the number of servers". And I thought, man, I was really not thinking, my first reaction when reading a twitter should be "this is bs, who is this person, where is the competence coming from, what it the game they are playing now", but it was not my first reaction, which was instead of passive acceptance. Dangerous game.
I think the character limit creates a blunt form of communication that leads to this toxic environment. It is practically designed to create misunderstandings and dismissive short responses to those misunderstandings.
The aren't generally arguing though.
Are you and I lacking in real life for engaging with each other here?
Twitter's community is the entire world. (as far as I know)
In my case, it's to have a conversation. Before I moved to the United States, I could have all sorts of conversations with people at work, no matter how controversial or stupid or weird. But in the US, the culture is different. There are things that you can't discuss with your coworkers, for various reasons.
When the pandemic hit and I stopped going to the office, that made the problem even worse. Sure, I didn't have any real friends here, but at least there was more randomness and diversity in my social life. I love my family, but it's an extremely limited pool of people to talk to.
So I found myself participating more and more on Twitter, on Imgur, and on certain game forums. Which, in turn, had the same impact on me as Facebook used to before I closed my account.
My own, very personal conclusion, is that the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them, making them turn to social networks to fill the void left by the absence of what used to be normal, every day way to socialize.
Then again, I'm just a sample of one, so my conclusion is almost certain to be wrong.
Is that unique to the US? It feels like something broadly true if I believe what I see in the news and online forums, but in my personal life it does not feel true at all.
On the other hand, I've talked to a lot of other immigrants who lived in different states before this, and the general consensus (in that admittedly small sample) is that the US is definitely different from South America or Europe in that sense.
For context, I lived in Chile before I moved to the US, and Chile is the country in South America that tries the hardest to be like the US. Even in Chile, it's easier to have a richer social life than here, despite longer working hours and longer commutes, which both result in having much less free time. My own theory is because you get to socialize more at work and, if you have a kid that goes to kindergarten or school, with other parents. Here? "Not so much" would be an understatement.
I don't really think about twitter as a social network. For me it's more like complete shitfest which is sometimes informative and/or funny.
Twitter is specially annoying because it constantly probes you, be it with irrelevant posts to see if you like them, and asking you to confirm what topics you like or dislike. At least it includes a disclaimer when it's doing that.
So 'most people don't tweet' isn't really that much of a stretch.
I'm annoyed by how this story seems to be jamming together unrelated things to paint a picture. Are people under the impression that twitter users are big political donors, or that twitter users don't mostly self-identify as independents? Are [capital-I]ndependents "somewhere in the middle," or is that just editorial trying to turn 42% of people into centrist charity-givers?
It's always, "Oh, I suppose it's okay if you vote for the wrong party, as long as your candidate is no actual threat to my own ideology. But <most recent Presidential nominee> is just going too far." Except that partisans have been saying this same thing about "<latest Presidential nominee>" for at least 50 years now.
This mindset is absurd, and only proves the author's premise about suggesting an isolated bubble.
In fairness, the media did a really good job making the low gas prices, low inflation, low taxes, record low illegal border crossings, well-handled foreign policy, and record breaking speedy vaccine development of the last administration somehow seem like the most evil thing ever, so a misled public can’t really be blamed too much for who they voted into office now.
I think more than anything they were just tired of hearing about it so they voted for the current guy for a little media break.
It was embarrassing for me to admit this, but I've found it to be a running thread throughout my educational and work career. I suspect it dominates my brain more because of early childhood experiences more, but I'm unsure because it seems taboo to admit to craving acceptance or acknowledgement.
Once I began admitting it to myself, it became a big part of what drives my growth. I now know the impact that accountability has on my success. I'd rather feel slightly embarrassed for wanting people to see my toy projects than limit my personal trajectory out of fear. I am mindful of depending on others for validation, and I try to strike a healthy balance between wanting to impress others and wanting to impress myself.
Apropos to the topic at hand, I'm using Twitter and Observable to "learn in public". I don't expect or intend to become an influencer. I just know that I can leverage the dopamine hits of upvotes and likes and retweets for my personal growth. I'm a social animal that needs to have his efforts directed through shared structures of meaning. So far, I've leveraged that in multiple areas to great effect.
I think the vital part is the aspect of accountability. Even just committing to updating a friend on progress and asking them to keep you to your word helps. I've found it hard to get people to do that work because it sometimes requires shifting from "friend" to "boss" mode. I don't really think it's fair to put my loved ones in that position lol
Except the social status journos have make this like of inquiry uncouth. It is someone both one of the most pressing issues of our media landscape, yet seen as a simple-minded and undignified perspective that sophisticated media won't touch.