I think what most fail on when it comes to Twitter, is following the right people.
Personally I follow a bunch of vendors of products I like, a whole ring of C++ and developers, as well as a few game developers. So I have a quite pleasant and informative Twitter experience because I am selective.
Yeah, and I also wish there was a way to filter out content from select people who I follow for their subject matter expertise, and I'm not interested in reading about their takes on politics. I don't mind that they're wanting to share those views, but I wish I could follow just their subject matter content. And by the same token, it would also encourage people to be able to post those non-subject matter tweets, if they knew that people wouldn't have to unfollow them if they preferred to avoid politics. Allowing people to choose to bifurcate what they follow a person for enhances the network, I think.
And I should say, it's not even necessarily about politics. I'm not a huge sports fan, and in the same way, I would like to be able to unfollow posts about sports, etc of friends on Facebook.
As long as you’re okay with politics leaking in. There isn’t a sub of any significant size that doesn’t become a reflection of the leftist echo chamber of the larger community.
Mods can surely delete comments that outright state anything political, but they don’t control the fact that the votes are controlled by the community and the votes favor things that fit in with a particular political world view.
All this to say, a vote-driven platform with an overwhelmingly one-sided user-base is not a great place to host a community.
This is not my experience with the specialized subreddits I follow (mostly reading, health, and tech related, all on the smaller side). However, I have noticed that people who like to label things as "left/right echo chambers" are extremely sensitive to what other people say and often read political intent where none is intended. Could this be what's happening to you?
> political intent where none is intended. Could this be what's happening to you?
Nope. You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about intent. It’s much broader with entire classes of ideas being oppressed and other bad ideas being accepted with refutations shunned.
A comment that reveals more about your leanings than anything to do with reddit.
Are you sure you're sufficiently equipped for a discussion about echo chambers and politics? Doesn't appear so. A moment of introspection might serve you well.
> A comment that reveals more about your leanings than anything to do with reddit.
It can’t be both. Either Reddit is biased and I don’t lean the same way or my comment said nothing about my leanings. Figure out what point you’re trying to make before throwing vague statements out.
> Are you sure you're sufficiently equipped for a discussion about echo chambers and politics? Doesn't appear so. A moment of introspection might serve you well.
Says the person who was incapable of actually engaging in a discussion about echo chambers and instead engaged in a personal attack.
It's more likely that you're sitting on the far end of a normal distribution, and what you see as an enforced echo chamber is just the vast majority of users sitting in the middle of that bell curve doing their thing.
In other words, if everyone is sitting to the left of you, maybe you're just sitting really far off to the right.
It’s not that there is anything particular about Reddit that attracts leftists, it’s just dominated by a young demographic that generally skews far left of the wider population.
> other words, if everyone is sitting to the left of you, maybe you're just sitting really far off to the right.
It’s not “everyone”, it’s just a simple majority of the users on reddit, which demographically is sitting to the left of the wider population.
So (setting aside the fact that a two dimensional political spectrums is bullshit) yes, I’m sitting on the right side of the curve in Reddit’s user base. But so are most professionals, parents, etc (I.e. folks over 25). And you only have to be sitting slightly to the right of the median before the vote ratio steam rolls you’re world view.
> and what you see as an enforced echo chamber is just the vast majority of users sitting in the middle of that bell curve doing their thing
That’s literally a fucking echo chamber. A community that has a voting mechanism that reinforces the views of the majority and suppresses anything unpopular with that majority group.
And yet plenty of right wing echo chambers exist there too and have for a very long time. They continue to host communities on reddit which are all, one sided. What exactly are you doing here on HN? Injecting politics, how are you any different than the folks you're complaining about?
> And yet plenty of right wing echo chambers exist there too and have for a very long time. They continue to host communities on reddit which are all, one sided.
You’re confused about what I’m saying. I didn’t refute that some group can gather in a special sub for right-wing topics while carefully banning thousands of wider users.
What I’m talking about is hosting a non-political community. The entire user-base of Reddit, on average, is leftist and those views leak into your community in the form of votes against/for particular topics.
> What exactly are you doing here on HN? Injecting politics, how are you any different than the folks you're complaining about?
Again, you’re confusing explicitly discussing politics with the effect of an echo chamber enforced by votes. Do you need me to explain the difference further?
Have to agree. 280 characters is not that much better than 140, and what good ideas are compressed into that format. Sure you can link to a blog post, but then you might as well use rss.
I think something we don't want to hear is that maybe we dont need non-curated, non peer approved, non verified contents and comments in life.
If newspapers have not evolved before the internet into just readers sending their mails it's because of the ultra low quality of nobody's view on anything.
Social media made us believe they were helping us share opinions to get the conversation started more directly, but in fact they just wanted to sell us toothbrushes while we were addicted to the fast food equivalent of journalism. Then it influenced journalists as well who dont know anymore how to lower their quality to get us to read them, now. Again to sell toothbrushes so they can survive.
And yes this comment itself is obvious, low quality, self contradicting too
You can put in all your political
words like “Trump” “Biden” to remove from your feed
This has improved my Twitter 10x. IT people can be so annoying on Twitter, they basically all have the same political stance.
I have a lot more respect for the people who just tell people to vote.
Oh yea, I wish I could block the whining that happens here on hacker News, it really turns me off the platform. Many threads I open and the top comment is just some tangential moan about something barely related to the subject matter.
From my start on Twitter, about 8 years ago, I have striven to keep my brand professional, mostly exchanging messages with other techies and micro-blogging. I also mix in some of my other interests, but above all I try to stay out of politics. This is hard to do when so many people I follow for professional networking are compelled to tweet and retweet really unhinged stuff. It's nothing but virtue signalling, almost never any content, mostly slogans, links to rants by thought leaders, and really hate-filled messages.
I've broken my rule recently to tweet covid-19 data and science. I try to make these tweets especially factual, but I have allowed my own views, which have changed over time, come through. This has become a political arena I cannot stay out of. I've been insulted by people I previously respected in the professional community, just ad hominem attacks, no data, no science, really no objective content at all.
>unfollowing anyone who has poor signal to noise ratio. More tweets about outrage than about anything I find useful.
I find this to be the most frustrating part of Twitter. There is a significant contingent of subject matter experts that freely co-mingle personal commentary on unrelated topics with their 'thought leadership'.
The really really frustrating part is that a good alternative existed.
It was know as Google+, allowed people to post under different topics from the same account and also create multiple pseudonyms that one could easily switch between.
Besides, for some reason the most annoying people from Twitter and Facebook never "got it" so it was mostly just photographers, electronic enthusiasts, Linux people and gardeners (at least that was my bubble).
Edit: also frustrating: for some reason the focus of Mastodon and ActivityPub seems to be on Twitter-style interactions, at least that was my impression last I checked.
Twitter has escaped Twitter. It is now everywhere, intertwined with other 'social' media, with other Internet forums, with traditional media.
You (we) cannot escape Twitter's nefarious effects any more, it doesn't matter who you follow directly on Twitter, it doesn't even matter whether you are on Twitter or not. Your 'timeline' may be clean and interesting, but you're still exposed to Twitter's virality.
Indeed. This started in the Arab Spring, and made it very clear that Twitter is a political accelerant, the fuel to everyone's Molotovs. However, because it's so determined to be content neutral, it offers no guarantee of the results of your revolution.
Changing who you follow won't clear Tahrir Square or Kiev Maidan.
I believe the word is society as opposed to Twitter. Anything dealing with people either changes nothing and is useless or it influences society and its effect cannot be escaped. Beanie Babies technically fall into the same category as they became a generational touchstone and every speculator who went bankrupt by affected services usage and tax revenue. It is sensationalized but I fail to see anything new.
There are two challenges with this - first, following people who focus on one thing, and second, focusing on one thing yourself.
When people tweet about a professional interest like code, and their other interests, and family things, and random fun stuff, your timeline gets noisy. Likewise, if you follow people because you like code, and more people for your other interests, and you follow your friends, and fun stuff, then it gets really noisy too.
I follow a lot of people for frontend dev things, but also some more people for wildlife photography, and local Northeast UK tech scene stuff. I had to cut down from following about 1000 people at peak to 300 because I couldn't keep up at all.
If you can focus who you follow and what you use Twitter for then it's good, but for most people who have multiple interests it's not. Lists help a lot, but you need discipline to use them well.
You used to be able to do the same thing with Facebook. It requires a lot of discipline there, because Facebook is always trying to douse you with a hose of poop.
On Twitter it’s easier. I follow baseball, ancient history people and museums, local topics, and some tech topics, and a tight list of COVID sources due to my job. But 2020 is a crazy year and even very typically narrow focus nerds are political and upset.
I moved almost entirely to lists for this reason, but with mixed results.
I follow too many people to categorize all fo them, so my hack is to wait until someone tweets into my main feed. Then when they do I add them to a list and then unfollow them. Ideally that means my main feed is empty.
The problem with this approach is that a lot of smart people are political right now. I'm political and so I appreciate this and know where they are coming from. But it does make it hard to have a single-purpose reading experience. For example, my feed of basketball twitter accounts is great when there is a game on, but it actually not all that different from my list of political/news accounts the rest of the time.
But overall, I think this is the approach to take.
The article isn't saying "my feed is boring", or even "my feed is full of extremists". I have a feeling the guy knows how to choose who to follow.
The problem he's raising is that at a social level, extremists voices spread much faster that sane ones because the way Twitter (and others) are built. The the tool of virality, once used for marketing, is now used to cripple down society. Sure you can pick who to follow, but as you can see from stories like pizzagate more and more people are having hard time choosing the right people to follow, and that makes our world a dangerous place.
He's not leaving Twitter because he didn't his experience. He's leaving because he thinks it's harmful to society and he doesn't want to be part of it.
I am on vacation now for a few days, but normally I have the Freedom service open a window of access for Twitter and HN briefly twice a day. Anything useful, then I paste URLs into my todos list.
Twitter us about just following very interesting people.
The problem is that almost everyone seems to dabble in politics or current events or argument which leads to you having to watch them throw a tantrum on the internet.
Much the world is in the grips of multiple overlapping political crises, many of which have existential consequences for the communities they impact.
Expecting people not to talk about these crises is like expecting Europeans living through WWI not to talk about all that ugly trench warfare business.
Personally I follow a bunch of vendors of products I like, a whole ring of C++ and developers, as well as a few game developers. So I have a quite pleasant and informative Twitter experience because I am selective.