> Twitter isn't perfect because people aren't perfect. There are trolls, toxicity, and extremists because the world has trolls, toxicity, and extremists.
I think there are some interesting points in this. But at the same time I think there's a fatal flaw that invalidates the conclusion.
> Twitter is irreplaceable
The main problem is the author overlooked the distinction between Twitter as a concept for "a communication media channel open to everyone" and specifically Twitter itself.
I can generally agree with the idea of wanting some information source other than "centralized media". I think it is a good thing to want. But there's quite a leap from there to thinking Twitter is so unique in this and so irreplaceable. As if there weren't others before, or after, or currently. As if there was something particular to Twitter.
I've really been digging blue sky the past few days. Being able to mute keywords has made my experience very close to old twitter, and there's real mature debates going on in places where they don't devolve into trolls screaming at each other.
YMMV, but I am hopeful that blue sky is going to keep improving and its culture of easy muting keywords will prevent the mass reach of trolls that are toxic to the community.
2. My parents would rather have me drinking than playing Role-Playing Games
At 16, I had to lie to my parents to play RPGs. I'd tell them I was off drinking beer with friends (which, back then, was legal).
Why? Because they got their information from TV and newspapers like everyone else. And what they read was that RPGs were satanic rituals and that "playing RPGs" meant murdering people.
I think it's a bit shallow for the author to blame everything on the media without even mentioning the extremely conservative Catholic church or how Spain was a full on dictatorship until Franco died in 1975. Likewise his prescription to just ignore the trolls ignores a lot of solid research on information warfare, tipping points and the like; the idea of 'Gresham's law of content', where bad drives out good once it rises above a certain portion of the total, has been around a good 15 years.
In the end it feels as if the author is projecting personal feelings onto a preferred platform and declaring an individual expression of demand to be an objective inelasticity. In reality networks cleave all the time, and indeed do in rather predictable ways that can be derived from the pattern of follows or interaction without even paying much attention to the content.
I read the entire piece; it is well-written, factually, well-balanced. It is your opinion, and readers can take-it-or-leave it your ultimate premise.
For me, I'll leave it. My takeaway: Twitter is indeed the worst global social network - of all time // AND, there are many others that are much better - factually so.
I like this article about how all the other social networks are worse than Twitter that only mentions other social networks in one sentence.
It is refreshing to see someone make a statement and then proceed to ramble about completely unrelated things with no intent of even revisiting the original thesis let alone defending or explaining it. I haven’t read anything this meandering and empty since I stopped using Twitter
This is a strange way to express your disagreement with the post.
The article clearly follows a course that outlines the process behind the author's beliefs. He says that he intends to share his argument against the alternatives later...So consider this the first part of what may became a greater work.
I disagree with him, although I don't discount all of his observations. But it's clear that he's put some effort into the article which is ostensibly meant to be continued.
> the article which is ostensibly meant to be continued.
I like the idea that the existence of one article necessarily implies the existence of a second article. Unless you think that is the case it appears as though the author finished
It's pretty ironic after all this talk about how other media presents biased misinformation and lies - go straight to writing essentially "no other network provides experts or good discussion, trust me". (just in case - this is not true)
> It is refreshing to see someone make a statement and then proceed to ramble about completely unrelated things with no intent of even revisiting the original thesis let alone defending or explaining it. I haven’t read anything this meandering and empty since I stopped using Twitter
It's refreshing to see a discussion on how different cultural approaches influence writing styles. I think this might partly stem from cultural differences. For example, in Latin-based cultures like Spain or France, it’s more common for authors to leave certain ideas implicit, expecting readers to infer connections or fill in gaps. This can sometimes come across as "rambling" or lacking focus, especially to readers from more fact-oriented cultures, like the American-centric style found here on HN.
In contrast, the American style tends to prioritize clarity, directness, and explicit connections between ideas. Without knowing the author’s background, it’s possible that what some perceive as a lack of explanation or defense in the original piece might simply reflect a different cultural approach to argumentation and storytelling. One that is less rigid but more open to interpretation, even if it invites criticism.
Not all the others, but all the popular enough others. And the definition of “popular enough” goes around attractive to the groups that want to influence, push agendas, sell or whatever. Closed or small enough communities have the opportunity to escape from that fate (or turn to echo chambers, or their members become isolated from the rest of the world because everyone else became alienated by what happens on the popular ones).
Being social and accepted comes with their own compromises because of the dynamics happening around them, some are of which try to use them as tools.
People with enough positive points have the ability to flag a comment or submission to indicate they don't feel like it belongs. Why it's flagged is sometimes difficult to figure out.
In your article, you write that a social platform without trolls is impossible. You simply encountered a dumb-ass troll who didn't like the fact that you like Twitter and he reacted this way.
I felt the same way until I came across the ninth point of the OP...which is a sound observation. I think most people who used Twitter at some point experienced an event where the free flowing of information about the event as it unfolded in real-time satisfy their want for information. Especially when the information possessed the informal presentation that traditional media does not typically have.
When you see a photo of Mike Brown's body laying in the street hours after he had been shot with his hands (allegedly) raised I reckon that you may form a lasting impression about the relationship between Black and Blue that will persist long after the official narrative is distributed.
I think people who have experienced this are exhausted. This sort of information exchange that is very serious and very real and very human cannot coexist where information that is not like that is also exchanged (but I may be digressing...).
The Powers That Be™ benefitted by both allowing them to become exhausted and by poisoning the well and making sure that the free discourse is as unsatisfying as possible and later platforms are echo chambers where the people most likely to congregate on platforms of outside importance can be satisfied by their shared dissatisfaction.
And all the cooks in the kitchen exist with the diners of their respective persuasions to cook and serve a meal some say is to die for.
I sympathize with the author’s perspective, as I have a connection to the Spanish experience (e.g. transition to democracy), not by living there, but through the magazine Cambio 16 [1], which played an insightful role in media at my home. When I was very young, I even read about the leather subculture [2], which opened my eyes to diverse cultural expressions.
My main issue with Twitter is its lack of tools to quickly customize or filter your experience. This limitation can pull users into a world of hate, almost like being drawn into a black hole. I’m not sure if this is intentional or something that will improve in the short term. I don’t use Mastodon often, but I’ve noticed constructive discussions happening there. Similarly, I think Reddit has been an incredible resource—one that its owners and managers often seem not to fully understand.
Experts
Who are independent
Recounting events they are experiencing first hand
And, on the same Twitter, you can find their opponents:
Disproving or debating them
With community notes which are displayed at the same level as the OP
Which rely on third party sources
This only happens on Twitter. And it infuriates traditional media, because they lose control of the narrative”
I think about wholly different Twitter experiences when I think of Twitter (X) in it’s current state, maybe 2018-ish twitter had the features mentioned but nowadays it’s;
- interaction bait
- ragebait (which partly overlaps with interaction bait)
- misinformation
- the owner throwing a hissy fit over almost nothing
- the owner roleplaying as his 3 year old son (this isn’t one you see often but it’s memorable)
Must be nice to be Twitter when the user think it is part of their democracy. Google does way more public services but people dont credit them that much.
> Twitter isn't perfect because people aren't perfect. There are trolls, toxicity, and extremists because the world has trolls, toxicity, and extremists.
Well put.
I think there are some interesting points in this. But at the same time I think there's a fatal flaw that invalidates the conclusion.
> Twitter is irreplaceable
The main problem is the author overlooked the distinction between Twitter as a concept for "a communication media channel open to everyone" and specifically Twitter itself.
I can generally agree with the idea of wanting some information source other than "centralized media". I think it is a good thing to want. But there's quite a leap from there to thinking Twitter is so unique in this and so irreplaceable. As if there weren't others before, or after, or currently. As if there was something particular to Twitter.
I've really been digging blue sky the past few days. Being able to mute keywords has made my experience very close to old twitter, and there's real mature debates going on in places where they don't devolve into trolls screaming at each other.
YMMV, but I am hopeful that blue sky is going to keep improving and its culture of easy muting keywords will prevent the mass reach of trolls that are toxic to the community.
2. My parents would rather have me drinking than playing Role-Playing Games At 16, I had to lie to my parents to play RPGs. I'd tell them I was off drinking beer with friends (which, back then, was legal).
Why? Because they got their information from TV and newspapers like everyone else. And what they read was that RPGs were satanic rituals and that "playing RPGs" meant murdering people.
I think it's a bit shallow for the author to blame everything on the media without even mentioning the extremely conservative Catholic church or how Spain was a full on dictatorship until Franco died in 1975. Likewise his prescription to just ignore the trolls ignores a lot of solid research on information warfare, tipping points and the like; the idea of 'Gresham's law of content', where bad drives out good once it rises above a certain portion of the total, has been around a good 15 years.
In the end it feels as if the author is projecting personal feelings onto a preferred platform and declaring an individual expression of demand to be an objective inelasticity. In reality networks cleave all the time, and indeed do in rather predictable ways that can be derived from the pattern of follows or interaction without even paying much attention to the content.
I read the entire piece; it is well-written, factually, well-balanced. It is your opinion, and readers can take-it-or-leave it your ultimate premise.
For me, I'll leave it. My takeaway: Twitter is indeed the worst global social network - of all time // AND, there are many others that are much better - factually so.
For those who still wish to engage with the service but not feed the beast, remove your tweets and your account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159073
I like this article about how all the other social networks are worse than Twitter that only mentions other social networks in one sentence.
It is refreshing to see someone make a statement and then proceed to ramble about completely unrelated things with no intent of even revisiting the original thesis let alone defending or explaining it. I haven’t read anything this meandering and empty since I stopped using Twitter
This is a strange way to express your disagreement with the post.
The article clearly follows a course that outlines the process behind the author's beliefs. He says that he intends to share his argument against the alternatives later...So consider this the first part of what may became a greater work.
I disagree with him, although I don't discount all of his observations. But it's clear that he's put some effort into the article which is ostensibly meant to be continued.
> the article which is ostensibly meant to be continued.
I like the idea that the existence of one article necessarily implies the existence of a second article. Unless you think that is the case it appears as though the author finished
> Here's a twelve-act essay…
his “twelve-act essay” in this post.
It's pretty ironic after all this talk about how other media presents biased misinformation and lies - go straight to writing essentially "no other network provides experts or good discussion, trust me". (just in case - this is not true)
> It is refreshing to see someone make a statement and then proceed to ramble about completely unrelated things with no intent of even revisiting the original thesis let alone defending or explaining it. I haven’t read anything this meandering and empty since I stopped using Twitter
It's refreshing to see a discussion on how different cultural approaches influence writing styles. I think this might partly stem from cultural differences. For example, in Latin-based cultures like Spain or France, it’s more common for authors to leave certain ideas implicit, expecting readers to infer connections or fill in gaps. This can sometimes come across as "rambling" or lacking focus, especially to readers from more fact-oriented cultures, like the American-centric style found here on HN.
In contrast, the American style tends to prioritize clarity, directness, and explicit connections between ideas. Without knowing the author’s background, it’s possible that what some perceive as a lack of explanation or defense in the original piece might simply reflect a different cultural approach to argumentation and storytelling. One that is less rigid but more open to interpretation, even if it invites criticism.
It is a tad strange to see something poorly-reasoned and jump to “maybe that’s just something that everybody in an entire country does”.
People from countries other than America can start with a thesis and then mention that thesis in the body of an essay.
Not all the others, but all the popular enough others. And the definition of “popular enough” goes around attractive to the groups that want to influence, push agendas, sell or whatever. Closed or small enough communities have the opportunity to escape from that fate (or turn to echo chambers, or their members become isolated from the rest of the world because everyone else became alienated by what happens on the popular ones).
Being social and accepted comes with their own compromises because of the dynamics happening around them, some are of which try to use them as tools.
Hey HN, what does [flagged] mean? Did I do something wrong when posting this? It's the first time I see it here.
People with enough positive points have the ability to flag a comment or submission to indicate they don't feel like it belongs. Why it's flagged is sometimes difficult to figure out.
Here's the FAQ entry
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
What does [flagged] mean?
Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
Ah, I understand. I don't think it breaks any rule, so it must be off-topic.
A bit harsh maybe, but gotta agree to the rules to play the game :)
In your article, you write that a social platform without trolls is impossible. You simply encountered a dumb-ass troll who didn't like the fact that you like Twitter and he reacted this way.
The outsized importance people assign to twitter is one of the greatest mysteries of the last 10 years.
I felt the same way until I came across the ninth point of the OP...which is a sound observation. I think most people who used Twitter at some point experienced an event where the free flowing of information about the event as it unfolded in real-time satisfy their want for information. Especially when the information possessed the informal presentation that traditional media does not typically have.
When you see a photo of Mike Brown's body laying in the street hours after he had been shot with his hands (allegedly) raised I reckon that you may form a lasting impression about the relationship between Black and Blue that will persist long after the official narrative is distributed.
I think people who have experienced this are exhausted. This sort of information exchange that is very serious and very real and very human cannot coexist where information that is not like that is also exchanged (but I may be digressing...).
The Powers That Be™ benefitted by both allowing them to become exhausted and by poisoning the well and making sure that the free discourse is as unsatisfying as possible and later platforms are echo chambers where the people most likely to congregate on platforms of outside importance can be satisfied by their shared dissatisfaction.
And all the cooks in the kitchen exist with the diners of their respective persuasions to cook and serve a meal some say is to die for.
What moron flagged this article and why? If you suffer for some kind of mental illness perhaps consider quitting moderation please?
I sympathize with the author’s perspective, as I have a connection to the Spanish experience (e.g. transition to democracy), not by living there, but through the magazine Cambio 16 [1], which played an insightful role in media at my home. When I was very young, I even read about the leather subculture [2], which opened my eyes to diverse cultural expressions.
My main issue with Twitter is its lack of tools to quickly customize or filter your experience. This limitation can pull users into a world of hate, almost like being drawn into a black hole. I’m not sure if this is intentional or something that will improve in the short term. I don’t use Mastodon often, but I’ve noticed constructive discussions happening there. Similarly, I think Reddit has been an incredible resource—one that its owners and managers often seem not to fully understand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambio_16
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_subculture
ok so the OP likes twitter because
“But on Twitter, you can read:
Experts Who are independent Recounting events they are experiencing first hand And, on the same Twitter, you can find their opponents:
Disproving or debating them With community notes which are displayed at the same level as the OP Which rely on third party sources This only happens on Twitter. And it infuriates traditional media, because they lose control of the narrative”
I think about wholly different Twitter experiences when I think of Twitter (X) in it’s current state, maybe 2018-ish twitter had the features mentioned but nowadays it’s;
- interaction bait - ragebait (which partly overlaps with interaction bait) - misinformation - the owner throwing a hissy fit over almost nothing - the owner roleplaying as his 3 year old son (this isn’t one you see often but it’s memorable)
If it's not bad enough for you to leave yet, it will be soon, thanks to enshittification without any limits, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484
Must be nice to be Twitter when the user think it is part of their democracy. Google does way more public services but people dont credit them that much.
Maybe should also count the bad stuff Google does.