Even though you are being down voted, I agree with the sentiment, perhaps it could have been put more diplomatically.
I really don't understand why someone would publicly admit that they don't have control of their own money. I see people admitting to it regularly as if it's something that can't be helped, but it just makes them look weak. Like they are lowering their social standing on purpose.
In my marriage, all accounts are shared. The only money that I could call "mine and not hers" is the cash in my wallet.
This arrangement seems extremely sensible to me. I know it's not for everybody, but in our case we trust each other completely and share a similar outlook on financial things, so it makes perfect sense to just share.
Since we're in it together, we run big purchases by each other just as an additional check. This helps soften irrational impulses, lets us suggest alternatives to each other, and just keeps us up to date with what's going on.
Please tell me, how does this mean that I "don't have control of [my] own money"? In what way does it make me "look weak"? Why should I keep this a secret? And why should I care about my "social standing" in the eyes of people who think this means anything important?
Both things can be true. That is, your arrangement sounds reasonable enough, but it remains the case that you have to get permission from somebody else to spend your money.
Sure. But the person I'm replying to thinks this means I don't have control over my own money, that it makes me look weak, and that it's the sort of thing I should be so ashamed of that I should keep it a secret. That's what I'm asking about.
Many married couples have joint accounts, into which all/most funds go and from which all/most funds come. For them, there's no "my money vs your money"... it's "our money". The idea is that their marriage joins them into a unit, and the money is spent on the unit. For many people $500-600 is a lot, and such a couple would want the decision to be a joint decision.
The crux is to understand that other people don't think exactly the same as you do. Many people will not actually see this as a sign of weakness. I am frequently able to understand why people do things that I would not do, and I'm no kind of genius.
> perhaps it could have been put more diplomatically
As mentioned in my other comment I was relating a phrase that was quite common "back in the day" for editorial purposes. This is what I don't like about the current world. There is no difference between saying someone yourself and relating either history or what someone else might say.
You didn't call out any difference, and you strongly implied that you agreed with this old-fashioned term. And I'm quite confident you did this on purpose, just so that you could come back and whine about how oppressed you are afterwards.
The other way of looking at it (and the way your comment came across) is that you're using 'back in the day' as a means to say what you feel, under the veneer of not actually saying it yourself. After all, if it didn't reflect what you thought, why would the phrase come to mind - and why take the trouble to call it out?
Underscoring this is that it's not actually "back in the day" at all. It's still a term that's commonly used.
It's mostly a male, working class dominated genre in terms of audience, so it's ignored and ridiculed for not being glamorous enough to fit mainstream media's mindset.
That's a good thing because they would slowly change it if they got their hands on it. Sony buying Century was disappointing but there's alternative labels. Metal should stay underground to protect itself from the people who see it as 'weird'.
I've never heard someone try to say Nickelback is metal as a serious argument. I have heard arguments for Evanescence. I usually toss Nightwish their way instead.
Being able to swap the battery has been a feature in mobile phones for decades, I wouldn't buy a phone without it. Same with laptops. My current Apple laptop is eight years old and still going fine purely because I was able to remove the battery when it started ballooning.
There's two things non-technology people don't seem to know about TED when they mention it to me.
First that TEDx events have little to do with TED. Second the prices for proper events are in the elitist levels of society. It's no surprise when you start to notice the audience members are more famous than the speakers.
Top sites and apps: Facebook, Google, New York Times, Gmail, Podcasts (that are increasingly ad supported), Google Maps, etc.
Most of the content that trends on hn. Long tail of content that lets you get an answer to just about anything on Google.
There's also services like Blogger, which I don't think have advertising, but since Google is probably the biggest player in the ad industry then I guess its existence relies on ads. Even web browsers like Firefox indirectly rely on ad money.
All of those services would do just fine charging for their service if they had to. Especially if their competition started doing it too.
I was referring to all the shit that wouldn't survive, like blog spam, scam/malware parked domains, etc. That crap makes up a huge part of the Internet, and nobody will miss it.
Web advertising is on the same level as spam as far as I'm concerned. They both depend on gullible and ignorant people who don't know any better clicking through. Just look at Google search result ads today vs 5 or 10 years ago. It's harder and harder to tell the difference between ads and results because they need to trick people.
It's not just some markets and some people. They're a VC backed multinational that moves into markets and offers big discounts over local businesses. They are getting a taste of their own medicine with an improved flavour.
I think it's better to enjoy life than worry about nutritional guidelines, which might extend our time in some retirement home. Especially something that's been in our diet for a long time. Just don't overdo it.
My in-laws, who have always regularly exercised and eat healthy are 10 years older but have a much higher quality of life than my parents who have done neither.
It's about staying out of the retirement home for as long as possible not how long you're there before you die.
Looking after your health can be an important component of being able to enjoy life well before the retirement home. Plenty of people are having heart attacks and strokes before age 60, before age 50.
To me it seems like a mindset issue rather than a predisposition - having gone through it.
Employment is mostly about taking on the burden of someone else's stress and handling it. When your stress becomes too much the employer hires peers and perhaps gives you some minions to make things better.
If you were never taught how to manage stress and your family hasn't ingrained stoic values into you (because they themselves were never taught them) then the body is going to become overwhelmed, give up and switch into protective mode, also known as burnout, anxiety, depression, breakdowns etc.
Great comment - thanks for sharing. I think I agree - it's not just about the environment you work in (although I think certain environments bring it out more), it's a certain type of personality/mindset maybe.
I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. They didn't affect me as I keep a low profile, but it was like seeing an omen and noticing friends were buying into their hype.
The way Twitter is now pandering to this lot with the recently announced Orwellian-style group, and other odd behaviour suggests that they approve of the current momentum.
I'm just glad to no longer have its weight on my shoulders. Life is great without social media, but it must be difficult for public figures who stick with it for the free promotion.
If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential.
Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions.
I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views.
We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.
I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be.
Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.
Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.
People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline.
If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people.
You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it.
I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.
Your prison system has been described as a slow-motion Holocaust and the new Jim Crow. Does that not count as political terrorism?
Or is this the same linguistic problem where 3000 dead in an intentionally collapsed building in NYC is terrorism, but two million killed by intentionally collapsing a middle-eastern state doesn't really have a word that we can use, so it seems harder to grasp somehow.
> Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.
Every tool, every medium, has some effect on its content. It makes something things easy, others difficult. It amplifies some channels, squelches others. It speeds some things up, slows others down.
Society has all sorts of wonderful things and terrible things. But we humans choose which tools to build and which media to promote. We can observe this and criticize choices accordingly.
So you would prefer to build tools to mask society's problems instead of uncovering them so that we can stare them in the face and have some type of discussion about them?
That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy.
As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook?
I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.
Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different.
It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas?
In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide.
However the communications platform can provide the user tools to control what/who they hear from so that they can make those decisions themselves.
> Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different
Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company.
As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are.
When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No."
> However the communications platform can provide the user tools to...
And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.
I think Twitter by its very nature promotes that kind of thing. The 140-character limit inherently pushes towards zingers and outrage. Nuance is stripped away by the medium.
Exactly - it's too easy to say that Twitter is simply a reflection of society itself, technology is not a completely neutral pass-through filter.
The 140-character limit strips all nuance out of conversation, so it's no surprise that when it comes to controversial topics everyone is an asshole. It turns out we need more than 140 chars when talking about complicated, important topics.
More than that, Twitter's choice of how users relate to each other also contributes to the nastiness - it's a medium specifically designed so that a single message can traverse a huge portion of the user graph, and this causes a lot of problems.
On Facebook, if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, at worst you'd have your friends (or friends-of-friends) telling you off, it almost never goes beyond that simply by nature of how friending works. FB's privacy settings (by default at least) literally prevents anything from being shared past N distance from you.
Ditto on old-school web forums - if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, you'll at worst be dogpiled by the forum's own users, but that's it. The link may be spread around, but few people will sign up to some new phpBB webforum just to yell at your stupidity.
On Twitter though your tweet goes viral and traverses many, many different communities, each of which get to layer their own outrage on. More than that, they are all free to respond to you, without filters. The pile-on effect is the scariest we've seen from any social network in existence.
Reddit also suffers from a similar problem - communities cross into each other almost too easily, so brigades are common. At the very least though most subreddits are moderated, whereas Twitter is really a free for all. We've seen how well Twitter's abuse team handles overt death threats and other far-beyond-the-pale abuse (read: lol).
This might not be particularly insightful coming from someone who never really got into Twitter, but their whole model of user interaction is fundamentally defective.
Honest question here - if you believe the issue is that information is too readily available, what is the solution to avoid brigading and the like? Segregating spaces? Safe speech spaces?
Pandora's box has been opened in social media and the internet, and it's not going to close again.
I believe what we're seeing is the happy crossroads of cavemen tribal thought that we got so used to before instant communication, and the, in my opinion inevitable, world-culture many years in the future.
I just don't buy that the issue is that too-much information is available. The issue is that taking offence to information is just so much en vogue right now for exactly the reasons you state. We used to only be able to pile on our family and friends. And to do that we had to really watch what we said, or else they'd be pissed at us for no good reason.
Now that communication is across the world, it just doesn't matter anymore to the individual (especially those who were raised to be self-centered, as I would argue we are currently being raised). So, I can threaten you with a bombing, because I'll never actually meet you. So it doesn't really matter to me.
Combine that with the NEED FOR FAME that we are fed by media. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants to be part of something famous. Everyone wants to be on the cutting edge of the next big movement. So, we yell and we kick and we scream and we insult and we don't think about consequences. Because something new will be along in the next ten minutes; so there are no consequences.
I love watching humans figure out new technology. It seems like we never really do it that well. I'm mostly just pissed that I was born too early for what we know should be possible, but can't figure out how to make happen.
I think casting my view as "information is too readily available" is a vast oversimplification.
Information being readily available isn't the issue, the issue is the ease in responding too it - more specifically the ease in responding thoughtlessly and flippantly, and the empathy gap that entails.
IMO the empathy gap is the problem we face socially as we move into the Internet age, and solving must in some part involve system design - this seems to be something Facebook has been aware of, but that Twitter hasn't.
> "Pandora's box has been opened in social media and the internet, and it's not going to close again."
Ehh, this isn't a complaint about social media in general, it's a complaint about Twitter's model in specific. Many social media services are working just fine without creating the epic shitstorms that seem to surround Twitter on a weekly basis - and I think the demographics of these services are leading indicators of who's succeeding and failing.
Facebook for example has largely solved this by defaulting things in such a way that limit post virality. They've also avoided a lot of abuse problems by clearly delineating ownership of spaces (if you post something abusive on my Wall, I can delete it). As opposed to Twitter where they've steadfastly maximized user ability to invade others' spaces but minimized ability to defend one's own (i.e., you can insert yourself into any conversation anywhere without any say on the part of the participants, and they can do it to you).
The adoption of Snapchat is also indicative - those who don't use Snapchat like to attribute its rise to teenagers sexting each other, but in reality a huge driver of their success is that people got tired of posting things for the judgment of the peanut gallery. The ability to share things with exactly the people you want (outside of the realm of direct messaging) is useful, and those who grew up under the pervasive pall of Facebook and Twitter are saying no to the old model. There is an overt rejection/separation of the "broadcast" mode of social media that those of us in the slightly-older set have gotten used to.
The most promising risers in social media aren't broadcast-style affairs, and they resemble a much more complex form of IRC/group messaging than anything else.
> "We used to only be able to pile on our family and friends."
This is really key - and drives at the heart of the problem. The issue right now isn't that people are being offended - a lot of that shit really is offensive. It's disingenuous to pretend that Twitter outrage is entirely synthetic by people who enjoy being offended (the whole concept of a "professional victim" is IMO reductionist and woefully inaccurate).
The issue is that responses to people saying offensive, ignorant shit is no longer proportional to the ignorant shit itself. There is a virtue to proportional response, and we're witnessing what happens when proportional response goes away - every thing, big or small, is automatically a nuclear war.
The structure of the system has a great influence on this. On Facebook because of the adherence to a voluntary opt-in social graph, responses are in general pretty proportional. If I say something racist in a post, I'll get called out by my friends and family, and none of them are going to SWAT me. On the other hand, if I say something vile on Twitter, I'll likely be receiving death threats.
It's even true in this specific case - IMO Stephen Fry's comments were shitty, and I think he ought to be called out on it - but a million-user pileup?
> "Combine that with the NEED FOR FAME that we are fed by media. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants to be part of something famous."
I actually think this is becoming less true over time. One thing I've noticed is that there's a pretty big generational gap between my "generation" that grew up without social media (basically late 20s and beyond), and those who grew up in it (mid 20s and earlier). The "everyone wants to go viral" thing is IMO stronger in our generation than it is for younger people, and part of it is that they've internalized the downsides more so than the rest of us.
I mean sure, I don't think we'll ever fully rid the human race of the need for validation and fame, but it honestly seems like the younger generation is exercising a lot more care in who and how they associate with others.
Thank you for your lengthy reply. I'm a CS student and usually attend meetups and workshops, mostly related to startups and entrepreneurship. Nearly everyone there introduces themselves with their names and twitter handles. I have heard this "advice" again and again that if you want to make connections, get active on twitter. How true is it? Is twitter really the place to get in touch with people more so than Facebook?
Yeah, this is really Twitter's saving grace, and also why as much as it is a raging dumpster fire, it is still valuable.
Facebook curbs abuse by basically making sure no one can bug you unless you opt-in to it (friending them), and limiting how viral your posts can go. The flip side of this is that this is a really poor way to talk to people you don't already know.
Twitter is the complete opposite - complete strangers can contact you, read your writings, and do whatever. This is wonderful for networking, but obviously has pretty tremendously large downsides. Because of this there are actual "communities" on Twitter in a way that basically doesn't exist on Facebook, because associating with new people is just so easy.
The existential-scale problem facing Twitter now is that abuse has gotten so out of hand, and that the power-users are far more susceptible to abuse than everyone else due to their visibility. More than that, shutting off abuse in the ways we know how basically means converting to Facebook's social model, which is pretty much the anti-Twitter.
Maybe there are ways to curb abuse while helping Twitter stay Twitter? This is the big outstanding question, clearly I'm pessimistic about it - the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole.
> the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole
The same could be said for 4chan and it's still here after 15 years and shows no signs of going away. Can't we assume that twitter will continue to exist as it is right now? But then again, twitter and 4chan are different platforms. People get hurt on twitter and by 4chan. I guess twitter is going to become the next MySpace.
Also I'd say the stream is part of the problem. Your tweet disappears from the stream quickly. The more noticeable it is, the more likely it is to have a life > 5 min.
> Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.
Which twitter has and encourages. It's called "bluelisting."
Yes, it's a human dynamic. In other spheres of interaction we've evolved mechanisms to cope.
I wrote about this a few years ago[0]. But for the day to day situation, Stephen Fry has made the sensible choice. There's no point drinking from a well people keep re-poisoning.
A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to.
For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not very nice. Another day, people were tweeting a Business Insider article on GitHub which directed me towards a series of tweets by some employee ranting about how white people 'cannot be taught empathy' and therefore should not be allowed into positions of power.
These are both very extreme political positions which ultimately revolve around hatred and dehumanisation.
It's just not a good user experience for this kind of thing to constantly be spotlighted by either Twitter, the 'professionally offended', or the 'professionally offensive'. I'd love to be able to tick a box which just says something like "just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously.
This level of hatred doesn't seem to appear on Facebook or on the front page of papers. I don't see why it should be such a big part of my Twitter experience.
I believe in freedom of speech and I'm anti-censorship but in advance I'd like a setting which would help me to avoid having to consciously decide not to see this material.
Interesting. I have a complete opposite experience. I see a lot of disturbing stuff on Facebook but virtually none on Twitter. I guess it just depends on who you follow on these social medias.
Luckily, Twitter is a private company and does not have to offer a platform for anyone to say anything. They are free to limit speech as they see fit. That includes people from the so-called SJW community. Its not even PC vs non-PC, because that itself assumes there is an obvious 'correctness' in the language one must use. The whole "that's offensive/that's X-ist" crowd is annoying as hell.
The notion of "professionally offended" implies making money off the whole thing. If you don't, than you're merely an amateur offended.
Also, saying that Twitter has a problem is like saying that fires can cause property damage. Twitter is a problem. It's designed for propaganda, whether corporate or political. There is very little else to it that an RSS feed can't do. You cannot use it to run a community or have a real discussion. 140 character limit dumbs things down. Retweets encourage mob mentality and echo chambers. Embedded pictures server to spread stupid memes (think 21st century propaganda posters) and also as an ugly workaround for the character limit. You can't even link to stuff properly, because... uh, reasons. (URLs really shouldn't have counted towards message length.)
If people thought things through, it wouldn't have taken off in the first place.
Something that I've seen is that Twitter claims to be interested in cracking down on people who harass.. But when people come and bully in the name of "social progress" .. they tend to look the other way. I've reported a tweet or two that attacked the reputation of an individual and was told "it's been reviewed but we deem it ok."
I think literally no one is happy with the level of involvement twitter has in preventing bullying. I don't think it has anything to do with what side of a debate you're on.
> I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential.
Unfortunately, it's not only Twitter where radfems and other (insert favorite swear word here) grab a stranglehold on public conversations. It's mass media too.
By "professionally offended", I assume you mean mostly marginalized people who are the recipients of torrents of abuse/death threats/rape threats/sexual harrassment/etc nearly every day they are active on twitter.
The "professionally offended" are actually a much smaller subset of the group of marginalised people - probably 0.1% at most, and many of them holding a lot of privilege.
The "professionally offended" are by definition those that make money from others' marginalisation. They benefit from prolonging inequality and maximising the emotional pain of others by spreading grievances as far and wide as possible. They do this as leverage for personal financial gain.
The average "marginalised" person doesn't deserve to be tarnished with the same brush. It's extremely bad of you to attempt to use them as a shield.
Communities of marginalized people also contain toxic people, unless you want to believe that by "virtue" of being marginalized we can assume a lack of toxicity.
I really don't understand why someone would publicly admit that they don't have control of their own money. I see people admitting to it regularly as if it's something that can't be helped, but it just makes them look weak. Like they are lowering their social standing on purpose.