The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.
Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.
It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass. The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.
He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is.
The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.
Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes.
1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-...
Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not start with Twitter or the internet.
The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016 onwards)
I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for "identity production" are quite interesting.
Or, more painfully, you'll see a lot of derisive quote-tweets, subtweets, hostile screencaps, the dreaded "ratio"... Twitter users are a catty bunch.
I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores.
I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias
This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".
Some are obviously “go out and find what you want someone to be saying”.
I'm struck by the parallel to typing the right prompt into GPT-3.
News consumers no longer need the journalist middle man, they can go directly to the source of the news.
Journalists should now, more than ever, be focused on traditional journalistic efforts. Succumbing to the temptation to just "find a story on Twitter" is just cementing the fact traditional media is dead and the era of the citizen journalist is here.
If your personal narrative drives clicks it will not be challenged in any way...whether you're a random poster on twitter or a participant in the story itself.
That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, and make note of how the sources are identified. I'd be beyond shocked if "twitter" appeared even once.
IMHO the real reason for "collapse in confidence in journalism" is that this is itself a meme driven by people who, for partisan reasons, simply don't want to have confidence in media reporting things "their side" doesn't want to be true. In a world where truth (about climate change, election results, disease impact, etc...) is a partisan thing, those whose job it is to report the truth become part of the war.
But reporters today are doing the same thing reporters have always been doing.
[1] Except the occasional circumstance where someone specific says something notable and it happens to be on twitter. Trump said lots of weird stuff and it got reported, but it's not like someone went around filtering his otherwise-not-notable tweets for juicy stuff. "He Just Tweeted it Out" is a meme for a reason.
Well said!
Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism rates are much higher than they are:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-p...
The original study said that 50-55% made it back into prison. The new study says it's more like 33% that make it back into prison. Yes, 1 of 3 is better than 1 of 2 but it's still 1 of 3. I'd call that high personally. In what other circumstance would I take a risk of something bad happening if the bad outcome happpened 1 out of 3 times?
The social graph of Twitter journalism is an ephemeron, it means only itself and maps to no other part of reality. This distorts in every direction it can, while giving no useful reference frame in return.
While true, it also distorts reality and leads to mistaken ideas about the world:
https://wonderfulengineering.com/the-authagraph-world-map-is...
This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit problematic because that should be based on the merit of the research. The same issues could arise for other experts or famous people, where as you say their opinions are disproportionately echoed due to their presence and activity on Twitter.
But substack is directly tied - so unless people really trust the author and refuse to cancel if they write something they don’t like you’ll be more inclined to avoid going outside the margins.
I wasn't sure what you meant by that. Now I'm really confused:
are blue check marks ever re evaluated or audited, and not just for authenticity of the person being who they claim but for the general validity of what they say or report?
Are there other badges similar to the blue check for other things? My understanding is that the blue check is for verifying people are who they claim, is there another badge to signify "hey this person posts legit things with references as a reporter"?
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 - Sept 2022 (36 comments)
- but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because it tends to split the discussion.
(You did the preferable thing by talking about this in the original thread.)
As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.
Infamously anti-west personality Sima Nan: "Being anti-American is work while visiting the U.S. is life" https://youtu.be/Q0y84Oi3VW8
Short summary, his wife and child are U.S citizens, and he visits them often, but his entire career is made up of bashing the west, western values, and putting the ccp on a pedestal, and he's made a small fortune on this career... until his turn came.
My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left.
Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it.
Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years.
And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care."
It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.
It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago?
I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.
Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort.
That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?
Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we’re practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any public communication mechanism.
In writing the story, took all of the crazy conspiracy letters and entertained the idea of "what if every single one were true?"
There is one major difference between then and now though; back in the '90s, those nutty voicemails never made it into the public domain, and thus those "ideas" were unable to spread.
In 2022, political rallies are playing Qanon theme music, because they know exactly how well those ideas have spread.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/politics/trump-rally-q...
Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality.
Quoting comment section of that article:
"This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world."
Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life".
Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most people's references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.
To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary term, rather than an epoch.
Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and capitulated.
In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same mountain as it has since then.
And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.
I'm currently following 50 accounts. No journalists (i.e., no news accounts). I get enough new things to think about and gadgets to consider. Quick examples:
When there's an outage, Cloudflare Radar can be useful. When there's a traffic event, my US state's DOT can be useful. When there's a new release of OpenBSD: @OpenBSD.
Trending for me now is "retrogaming."
If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind.
Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.
"Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes, drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years. Only $495"
I wouldn't call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should understand and see through the biases. It's a poor model given the realities though.
Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person to be active in multiple internet communities. I've been surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name and beliefs).
The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it's easy to think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these problems).
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
>Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets.
Where did this 60% come from? Did the author really translate survey responses along the lines of a user "sometimes" posting political content and uses Twitter "a few times each week" to a direct percentage of all tweets? This isn't even getting into that "using" Twitter doesn't necessarily mean posting tweets.
it really put me off when twitter started inserting suggested topics and tweets from people i really didnt follow to just fill out my feed. even more offputting was the suggested tweets came interspersed in the tweets of those that i follow. does it happen to others or is it just me because i only follow a few people < 50.
This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced at least that many people.
The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that it's actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the person making this claim isn't either literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what he writes.
And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it massively amplified. Terrifying.
I don't care for this Tristan Snell person, an obvious political shill. But your protestations ring hollow. The psychological manipulation in this example and a recent Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio (music playing over the speech, similar coordinated gestures of religiosity in the audience) are screamingly obvious.
It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.
Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.
I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about.
I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about.
If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
Every time I’ve tried to cultivate a nice list of feeds it has been constant hassle to manage it.
I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt to it, in the long run probably for the better.
The Twitter experience depends mostly on who you follow and how.
The "who" is self-explanatory, and for the "how" I recommend solely using Twitter Lists almost exclusively.
You can also create a list of people who you are consistently interested in hearing from.
However, I agree that you’re probably better off without Twitter. It’s a time sink.
How about leaving it at shutting down and be done with it.
The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives.
My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with "cancel" bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it.
If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).
Very well put.
Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.
Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on the internet :)
Which potentially has implications if your area of interest isn't inherently tied to the main polarization axis.
I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all.
I'm left a bit confused.
It is a giant echo chamber of very few, where the media buys in to the echo as "everyone" and reverberate outside of the chamber as the truth.
I get:
- The tyranny of structurelessness
- ... of merit
- ... of tears
- ... of the dark
- ... of metrics
- ... of weakness
and I'm sure they'd just keep going if it could display more entries at once. While typing, it brought up an article complaining about Millennial design aesthetics containing the phrase, "the tyranny of terrazzo".
It's like "goto considered harmful" but with a longer history, and way more popular—familiar to a much wider set of readers than "... considered harmful", that is.
The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is full of people who agree with you.
What grandparent commentator is talking about is, to me, more about realizing that Twitter isn't Taco Bell: It's arsenic. Or lead in makeup: Actively, immediately harmful. Not just 'bad for you'.
Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow` user @A.
Ideally:
> twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A
Edit: API Review Time!
I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.
Pretty crappy to limit people’s ability to curate.
Go one step further and support block groups, so if NFT’s become interesting you can enable them.
Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
And if you look at the graph below, it does seem to show Twitter users who post political opinions skew liberal.
* influential politicians
* journalists
* Jerome powell "... though there's some evidence that Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for ideas on monetary policy"
* College educated people (94 million americans)
I don't think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't need people to watch as many ads as possible. So perhaps the solution is a version of Twitter that can exist without monetization.
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
The word "liberal" means exactly that - showing preference and deference to private enterprise - in the overwhelming majority of the world, as it refers to economic liberalism.
However, during the 1800s and early 1900s, the word "conservative" continued to hold its monarchist overtones, and therefore it was rejected by all American politicians, regardless of their party. The first presidential candidate to describe himself as a "conservative" was Barry Goldwater in 1964.
I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-left-liberal distinction.
But in case it helps explain, at least in America, "liberal" has the basic connotation of "individual equality". Originally this meant equality before the law, often called "classical liberalism" which both left and right generally endorse.
But then the left become associated with a greater expanded equality -- more social programs, safety nets, education, etc. The left therefore became associated with the term "liberal" while the right with "conservative" -- liberals interested in greater social equality, conservatives believing in more of a natural social hierarchy (still on top of legal equality). Then conservatives came up with the moderately-used term "neoliberal" to promote their market-based economic policies based on classical liberalism, in opposition to the left-wing expanded equality social policies. There's also the term "libertarian" which refers to classical liberalism without anything added -- no social equality of the left, and also no conservative cultural values of the right.
But nevertheless, I'm extremely curious to know what you call liberal that is distinct from both right and left?
Leftists (so called) economically challenge the idea that markets are inherently good, asserting that many industries should not be market based. Health insurance, prisons, schools, and so on. They tend to be more open to universal social programs which don't require stringent needs testing.
Leftists tend to distinguish themselves from liberals more than distinguish liberals from conservatives in my experience. I would say liberals in America have much higher respect for marginalized groups, and they seem to have a desire to solve problems, as opposed to Republicans.
edit at 1636 UTC: My above comment is quickly thought out and from mobile. I think "party alignment" would be somewhat more complex if our voting system allowed more than two parties to exist.
I quite like the definitions here[0] honestly, and to quote from that:
> We believe markets are astonishingly good at creating wealth but less good at distributing that wealth. We support a market-based economy that promotes economic growth and nurtures innovation, while also supporting a safety net that shares the gains of that growth with everyone.
In the UK, I would contrast that with a left who are skeptical of free markets, and a right who are skeptical that anyone who doesn't accumulate wealth under free markets should be entitled to any.
Assuming you're American, and assuming my memory of their positions is correct, Elizabeth Warren is a liberal where Bernie is a leftist.
America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought have any relationship to "left." In Australia, the right-wing party is called the Liberal Party.
"Liberals" are free market advocates who support change through competition and a hands off approach by government. "Conservatives" prefer the government support of firm moral values and established traditional institutions.
Somehow the US thinks that "liberal" means having a concerned look on your face, and that it's somehow related to communism, which takes the exact opposite position on the liberal's only defining belief. Communism shares so much more with conservatism, starting with an absolute belief in the importance of morality and institutions. Communism's major difference from conservatism is that it believes that the traditional institutions were created and controlled by a small group of inbred people for a small group of inbred people (which is undeniable, but also when conservatives get off the bus.)
