As shown with the horror movie tweets, literally anything said can offend someone. This is why I created a new social media platform for Cancel culture.
BTW: if you own the whole pointless.click domain you could rent out subdomains, at least I instantly wanted one (or maybe you use them yourself already, I just don't find anything on pointless.click)
Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day.
This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet
I think the issue here is human socialization and not twitter or technology. People love to play the "did you see what so-and-so said?" game in all its variants, and as far as I can tell this has been true for millenia. It has nothing to do with a trending topics feature
I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time
Yes, and. Twitter being a nationally unified space of gossipy people, with journalists who actually write the narrative being addicted to the gossip as well...
There were multiple actual news stories about this stupid Alien tweet! Sure, they weren't front page at the NYT but this stuff is melting the brains of all the journalists, who then go on to melt the normies brains with it.
I think technology is changing which kinds of gossip get spread. It used to be either things you heard directly from the people in your circle, or on tv / newspapers / magazines. Now it's algorithmically determined to be the stuff that's most likely to be shared out of a giant planet of random gossip. Algorithms reinforcing these kinds of vices make it far more extreme.
I either completely agree or completely disagree, not quite sure. On one hand, yes, it is not exposing things that don't already exist in human nature. On the other hand, I've seen lots of things said on Twitter (and other social networks) that I've just never seen people say in in-person interactions, because the normal rules of social interaction would make people feel an intense shame/embarrassment to say it face-to-face without the benefit of pseudo-anonymity.
I think this "context collapse" explanation is really accurate, because it explains that it's not just "human nature", but it's actually taking advantage of how humans have really only evolved to have back-and-forth conversations with other people who have the same conversational context.
I think you are absolutely right, but that unfortunately means it's Twitter that has to change. We certainly aren't going to alter the design of humans within the time span of one generation.
So we should build communications platforms that account for human nature.
Some form of this is happening to me on hackernews as we speak.
A long time ago, I had a lot of karma, almost a thousand. I was a model citizen for HN. But at some point, I must have posted a controversial opinion, and then HN decided they wanted to cancel me. If it wasn’t for a downvote limit per post, my karma would be below zero by now. Instead it has dwindled and deteriorated slowly over time, trending toward nothing. Nothing I do will move the needle to recover my karma, I’ve simply accepted that someday my karma will be so low that I’ll be shadow banned forever.
Part of this is my own fault, as my posting habits changed to more bitter and cynical tones as a result of knowing that no matter what I say I will accrue inexplicable downvotes, so why spend effort softening my words? But it’s amazing that sometimes a completely mundane post suddenly has -4 downvotes out of nowhere.
I wish I could see a plot of my karma over time, and know the exact point it all went wrong, so that perhaps I could learn and conform a bit better to the popular opinion. Unfortunately I know of no such tool.
If you think someone is systematically downvoting you, you could email dang and ask him to look for a pattern of who's doing the downvoting. I'm sure he has the tools to do that. I'm also sure that stalking someone to downvote all their posts is against at least the spirit of HN, and probably against the letter of some of the guidelines.
My anecdotal experience, HN upvotes informative, constructive, and positive comments. And it downvotes negative/cynical, political, or unsubstantive comments. I have had comments with very similar arguments, but different delivery receive very different treatment.
Also, if you are trying to recover karma, stick to the less controversial topics. It is near impossible to get downvoted when providing informative comments on more tech/programming oriented topics. Alternatively, create a throwaway account for the controversial threads. Added bonus is that switching accounts will give you a nice pause to rethink whether commenting on said thread is really worth it in the first place.
I've never heard of you. What does it mean that "HN decided"?
Looking at your comments over the past 14 days, every one that's grey can be explained by enough people legitimately disagreeing with you to make them grey.
This phenomenon is hardly unique to Twitter or social media. It happens all the time in schools. The local town newspaper could set off these sorts of things too (or national media).
I suspect it could happen in any case where there is widespread (relative to audience) information discovery of something and people who are all too happy to be mad at people.
Cigarette use was very common among people before it was shown that nicotine is a carcinogen. Since then, people have cut down cigarette usage drastically and most countries now require manufacturers to have warning labels on cigarette packets. I hope social media services suffer the same fate. It was cool to be on social media when it was new and people were genuinely happy that they could keep in touch with their friends and relatives so easily. Since then, harmful effects of social media—from privacy concerns to disinformation to psychological problems induced by their usage—have been widely discussed and established. So, just like it happened with cigarettes, I think it's time for people to collectively reject social media services and go back to communicating and expressing their thoughts like they did before.
I never have and never will use twitter as it it too toxic for any well adjusted human to use. This applies to all social media: facebook, instagram, twitter, tik tok, ... If people just stop using these abhorrent apps all of these issues will be diminished as never in the history of humanity has each single human had so much access to ... other humans which are not well composed together and are ready to jump and argue on anything for a bit of dopamine (same as me actually right now, arguing against twitter. I’m part of the problem)
Isn't it an education failure? Somehow we educated a generation of angry people who favor "narratives" over facts, who favor mind-reading or attack-of-motives over rigorous debates, who favor what justice or righteousness in their mind over tolerance, who favor emotion over truthfulness. With growing number of such people, I don't see how a platform can help. On the other hand, the same group of people will be in charge of platform, like what see in Twitter.
It's easy to formulate it this way, but the sad reality is that these are actual people reacting in this way, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes because it fits their worldview, sometimes because they believe that by expressing their anger they will really make the world a better place. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform, digital or analog. Social media just acts like an amplifier for all possible opinions.
It's a common theme, actually: many people believe that everything they don't like should be eliminated. That's exactly the opposite of one of the best developments of our civilization: that many cultures and people with completely different worldview can live peacefully next to each other and even collaborate for the common good.
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people", I quote this metaphorically, Twitter is used by Cancel Culture, yet you blame Twitter, that's typical Cancel Culture.
The article title is a misquote [1] from the interviewed subject of the article, in which the subject recounts a situation where their mundane tweet was replied to thousands of times, and was trending before and after because of a Twitter feature designed to highlight high-interaction tweeets from verified accounts.
This is essentially clickbait, because it sets up an expectation in the reader that cancel culture may be involved. I have a low opinion of intentionally manipulative titles, and consider them to be a platform failure.
[1] It's literally a misquote, because the interviewed subject is in truth even more dismissive of the concept of cancel culture, but all of this is a red herring, because no one in their right mind ought to think this bizarre situation was a manifestation of cancel culture. Don't pick this apart uncharitably, my assertion does not preclude from "people in their right mind" nonetheless believing in cancel culture; my assertion is that no one in their right mind should think that This bizarre incident was a manifestation of cancel culture.
Nonetheless, the writer does have a point. The 'trending' feature was easily manipulated in the past, and now that it's been changed to add some editorial commentary, it's now complete nonsense masquerading as newsworthy happenings. But the whole site has been like that since retweets were added, where everyone is just trying to ride the coattails of being adjacent to a viral tweet and go viral themselves. Lots of people claim they get value out of Twitter, but when you listen to their example, they invariable engage in curation of their friends and the people they follow, and stick to interest-based communities rather than bored people shitposting. There's no value in Twitter-at-large, except to the trolls and people who seek fame or infamy for its own sake.
But where the writer falls short is they don't present a clear alternative. They point a laser pointer at some bizarre event that only a few thousand people know about that blowed up a blue-check person's phone for a day, conclude the whole site a cesspool, and ask us to ponder in our hearts if we deserve something better. Yes, we do, and we use those sites, like this one, and engage with those communities instead. And I think a lot of people do. Yet some people still use Twitter too, so perhaps it fulfills a genuine demand for something after all.
It's interesting that naively you can't prevent "context collapse" and "filter bubble" at simultaneously: you must allow for people to be exposed to and engage in topics they don't really know anything about or contribute constructively in, or wall them off only into the communities that they participate in.
There are probably nuanced and ingenious solutions to this, but nothing straightforward.
Implicitly, this piece is making an argument for a return to gate keepers/taste makers of yore. I'm not sure that's better. For better or worse, would the BLM movement have the power and reach it does today if it were filtered through establishment news sources?
I remember seing twitter early on and thinking it wasn't too impressive but guessed it was just an MVP and it could become fantastic in a couple of years when they added groups and topics and machine-to-machine and became a messaging backbone of the internet.
Instead they doubled down on being a massive high intensity low value channel: technically impressive yet sad.
> Wanna singlehandedly stop a disinfo catastrophe in October?
> Tell Twitter to eliminate Trending Topics for the whole month.
> Gaming Trending Topics was Wikileaks' strategy. It's how Pizzagate emerged from the fringe.
Pizzagate "emerged" from 4chan or 8chan, not as a Wikileaks' strategy. If we're going to talk about bad faith interpretations or "context collapse", I'd like to see an example that isn't so clearly false, almost to the point of it just being political bullshit.
I followed the logic of this story right up until it jumped into this nonsense.
Twitter is addicting, that's why. People who use Twitter the most both love and hate Twitter. It's like a video game -- actually, I'd go further and say it is one. Sometimes you hate the game you're playing at a particular moment, but you still play.
IMHO Twitter is great, I think I find more interesting things there then HN. I't more how you curate your own feed, don't follow people that are "political" or have some "agenda". My feed is mostly about math, art, physics and EU policy level discussions. Same thing with youtube, you just have to train the AI so it knows the sort of things you like. And don't comment, no one cares.
People get a kick out of that stuff, literally. Likes, Retweets, these stimuli are like a drug. So is being part of a harassment brigade born out of nothing apparently...
Personally I never "got" Twitter. How Am I supposed to understanding anything to these chaotic and fractured conversations? They make no sense, who is responding to whom exactly? there is something very wrong with the format to begin with. It's like everything is engineered to generate strife and arguments in order to drive up "engagement".
> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage
Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.
Twitter is a platform for amplifying messages to be sure.
We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by the community as hacks for features that didn't exist natively.
I once met one of the original employees of Twitter (back when it was Odeo) at a conference and he explained some of the early uses of the platform when it was built around SMS.
There were instances of protestors who would message "police spotted 23rd street" and presumably other users would receive that message on their timelines.
To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter was designed for protests but it seems a lot of the things that make it look more "conversational" were definitely after thoughts and so it's no wonder that it's so broken as a medium.
Even more plainly, getting anything across with nuance in 280 characters (it was 140!) is swimming against the stream no matter how many pseudo-features like threading are added.
I've always thought of Twitter as an indigestible enormous chatroom, that users interact with via the aid of different kinds of filters. The format and platform do sometimes exasperate negative tendencies but I think the primary design flaw is within human nature not Twitter.
In my understanding its a free worldwide immediate news distribution service. Was never planned for a reasonable discourse? I am a bit disappointed that BitClout started with that paradigm.
What would happen if there was an app that helped victims of Twitter pile-ons start tweeting generic political hot-potato non-sequiturs when something like this happens? E.g.,
* Stop the Uyghur Genocide
* Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times
* a UK judge found U.S. detainment conditions so brutal they refused to extradite Assange to the U.S.
etc.
Now the recommendation engine can do one of two things: boost the hot-potato and bring heat from the relevant nation state actor(s), or ratchet down the noise and eat the cost of the lost engagement.
Edit: replace "app" with "static site with an unordered list of such geopolitical hot-potato non-sequiturs"
False. Sure, platform failure as described is a real thing. But the point here assumes that there are not roving gangs of people who have weaponized this platform failure as a form of virtue signaling.
Again, until you've had a few thousand people attempt to cancel you for a misunderstanding it's easy to keep repeating the lie that cancel culture doesn't exist. It does. It's real. And claiming it doesn't exist is the snake eating itself.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
https://cancel.pointless.click
[+] [-] eitland|5 years ago|reply
BTW: if you own the whole pointless.click domain you could rent out subdomains, at least I instantly wanted one (or maybe you use them yourself already, I just don't find anything on pointless.click)
[+] [-] tonfreed|5 years ago|reply
This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hooande|5 years ago|reply
I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time
[+] [-] refenestrator|5 years ago|reply
There were multiple actual news stories about this stupid Alien tweet! Sure, they weren't front page at the NYT but this stuff is melting the brains of all the journalists, who then go on to melt the normies brains with it.
[+] [-] yuliyp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago|reply
I think this "context collapse" explanation is really accurate, because it explains that it's not just "human nature", but it's actually taking advantage of how humans have really only evolved to have back-and-forth conversations with other people who have the same conversational context.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
So we should build communications platforms that account for human nature.
[+] [-] Fricken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|5 years ago|reply
A long time ago, I had a lot of karma, almost a thousand. I was a model citizen for HN. But at some point, I must have posted a controversial opinion, and then HN decided they wanted to cancel me. If it wasn’t for a downvote limit per post, my karma would be below zero by now. Instead it has dwindled and deteriorated slowly over time, trending toward nothing. Nothing I do will move the needle to recover my karma, I’ve simply accepted that someday my karma will be so low that I’ll be shadow banned forever.
Part of this is my own fault, as my posting habits changed to more bitter and cynical tones as a result of knowing that no matter what I say I will accrue inexplicable downvotes, so why spend effort softening my words? But it’s amazing that sometimes a completely mundane post suddenly has -4 downvotes out of nowhere.
I wish I could see a plot of my karma over time, and know the exact point it all went wrong, so that perhaps I could learn and conform a bit better to the popular opinion. Unfortunately I know of no such tool.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qqqwerty|5 years ago|reply
Also, if you are trying to recover karma, stick to the less controversial topics. It is near impossible to get downvoted when providing informative comments on more tech/programming oriented topics. Alternatively, create a throwaway account for the controversial threads. Added bonus is that switching accounts will give you a nice pause to rethink whether commenting on said thread is really worth it in the first place.
[+] [-] skinkestek|5 years ago|reply
Wow, just checked your history going back a while and in your case it seems to be more than usual..!
Not saying I agree or that the posts are high quality but you seem to be hit unreasonably hard at times.
[+] [-] WalterGR|5 years ago|reply
I've never heard of you. What does it mean that "HN decided"?
Looking at your comments over the past 14 days, every one that's grey can be explained by enough people legitimately disagreeing with you to make them grey.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Yaa101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
I suspect it could happen in any case where there is widespread (relative to audience) information discovery of something and people who are all too happy to be mad at people.
[+] [-] b215826|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strange_things|5 years ago|reply
I never have and never will use twitter as it it too toxic for any well adjusted human to use. This applies to all social media: facebook, instagram, twitter, tik tok, ... If people just stop using these abhorrent apps all of these issues will be diminished as never in the history of humanity has each single human had so much access to ... other humans which are not well composed together and are ready to jump and argue on anything for a bit of dopamine (same as me actually right now, arguing against twitter. I’m part of the problem)
[+] [-] hintymad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|5 years ago|reply
It's a common theme, actually: many people believe that everything they don't like should be eliminated. That's exactly the opposite of one of the best developments of our civilization: that many cultures and people with completely different worldview can live peacefully next to each other and even collaborate for the common good.
[+] [-] Koiwai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp-dude-87844|5 years ago|reply
This is essentially clickbait, because it sets up an expectation in the reader that cancel culture may be involved. I have a low opinion of intentionally manipulative titles, and consider them to be a platform failure.
[1] It's literally a misquote, because the interviewed subject is in truth even more dismissive of the concept of cancel culture, but all of this is a red herring, because no one in their right mind ought to think this bizarre situation was a manifestation of cancel culture. Don't pick this apart uncharitably, my assertion does not preclude from "people in their right mind" nonetheless believing in cancel culture; my assertion is that no one in their right mind should think that This bizarre incident was a manifestation of cancel culture.
Nonetheless, the writer does have a point. The 'trending' feature was easily manipulated in the past, and now that it's been changed to add some editorial commentary, it's now complete nonsense masquerading as newsworthy happenings. But the whole site has been like that since retweets were added, where everyone is just trying to ride the coattails of being adjacent to a viral tweet and go viral themselves. Lots of people claim they get value out of Twitter, but when you listen to their example, they invariable engage in curation of their friends and the people they follow, and stick to interest-based communities rather than bored people shitposting. There's no value in Twitter-at-large, except to the trolls and people who seek fame or infamy for its own sake.
But where the writer falls short is they don't present a clear alternative. They point a laser pointer at some bizarre event that only a few thousand people know about that blowed up a blue-check person's phone for a day, conclude the whole site a cesspool, and ask us to ponder in our hearts if we deserve something better. Yes, we do, and we use those sites, like this one, and engage with those communities instead. And I think a lot of people do. Yet some people still use Twitter too, so perhaps it fulfills a genuine demand for something after all.
[+] [-] jhanschoo|5 years ago|reply
There are probably nuanced and ingenious solutions to this, but nothing straightforward.
[+] [-] tqi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Casadaro-labs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trident5000|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] marshmallow_12|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
... But Twitter ain't it. I deleted my account years ago and have never been happier.
[+] [-] eitland|5 years ago|reply
Instead they doubled down on being a massive high intensity low value channel: technically impressive yet sad.
[+] [-] isoskeles|5 years ago|reply
> Tell Twitter to eliminate Trending Topics for the whole month.
> Gaming Trending Topics was Wikileaks' strategy. It's how Pizzagate emerged from the fringe.
Pizzagate "emerged" from 4chan or 8chan, not as a Wikileaks' strategy. If we're going to talk about bad faith interpretations or "context collapse", I'd like to see an example that isn't so clearly false, almost to the point of it just being political bullshit.
I followed the logic of this story right up until it jumped into this nonsense.
[+] [-] david422|5 years ago|reply
However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.
[+] [-] anonytrary|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrnr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_m239339|5 years ago|reply
People get a kick out of that stuff, literally. Likes, Retweets, these stimuli are like a drug. So is being part of a harassment brigade born out of nothing apparently...
Personally I never "got" Twitter. How Am I supposed to understanding anything to these chaotic and fractured conversations? They make no sense, who is responding to whom exactly? there is something very wrong with the format to begin with. It's like everything is engineered to generate strife and arguments in order to drive up "engagement".
[+] [-] bjourne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CivBase|5 years ago|reply
Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.
[+] [-] spondyl|5 years ago|reply
We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by the community as hacks for features that didn't exist natively.
I once met one of the original employees of Twitter (back when it was Odeo) at a conference and he explained some of the early uses of the platform when it was built around SMS.
There were instances of protestors who would message "police spotted 23rd street" and presumably other users would receive that message on their timelines.
To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter was designed for protests but it seems a lot of the things that make it look more "conversational" were definitely after thoughts and so it's no wonder that it's so broken as a medium.
Even more plainly, getting anything across with nuance in 280 characters (it was 140!) is swimming against the stream no matter how many pseudo-features like threading are added.
[+] [-] bentcorner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infoseek12|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsemrau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hindsightbias|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yurielt|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
* Stop the Uyghur Genocide
* Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times
* a UK judge found U.S. detainment conditions so brutal they refused to extradite Assange to the U.S.
etc.
Now the recommendation engine can do one of two things: boost the hot-potato and bring heat from the relevant nation state actor(s), or ratchet down the noise and eat the cost of the lost engagement.
Edit: replace "app" with "static site with an unordered list of such geopolitical hot-potato non-sequiturs"
[+] [-] saul_goodman|5 years ago|reply
Again, until you've had a few thousand people attempt to cancel you for a misunderstanding it's easy to keep repeating the lie that cancel culture doesn't exist. It does. It's real. And claiming it doesn't exist is the snake eating itself.