Comment by sametmax
8 years ago
As much I can see every single point you make in my daily tweeting, this is ignoring all the positive things happening.
On twitter, I also see:
- people helping each others
- people apologizing (yes, it happens)
- people sharing creations, ideas and news
- people encouraging each others
It's not all flowers and rainbows, but let's not forget about the good parts of it.
Twitter is not a hate machine.
People have a lot of hate in themself, and they just use whatever convenient medium there is to express it.
I would actually more complain about twitter being riddle with bots, advertisers and scammers.
Certainly all these things exist! And they are beautiful.
But every platform amplifies certain behaviours more than others. The question is, which way does Twitter lean, on balance? Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on Twitter, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt?
Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on LIFE, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt?
People on the road, queing at the bank ?
And IRL, the system is a safe gard because being a jerk can lead to worse consequences.
But that's not twitter's fault.
what a naive worldview! it is most definitely their fault. i worked there. there are giant televisions showing surging click counts and impressions. this translates to revenue almost linearly. matter of fact anything you did that had a negative material impact on revenue, such as bot detection would be stuck in reviewboard for eternity.
to a first approximation, all the good kind people you talk about simply do not tweet that often. they mostly spend time with their families, read books, go on vacation, do research, write papers etc -thats where the good stuff they share so infrequently comes from. good stuff takes a while to germinate, it doesn’t pour out of you.
whereas the high frequency impressions generated by 24/7/365 vitriolic hatemongers, the nra & their supporting bots who have the gall to tell the classmates of the kids who died “they couldn’t care less” - those impressions and their likes and rebuttals go straight to the bottom line. Hate needs to be fed. I don’t particularly care if you like or retweet a happy incident I posted. I am already happy, I am just sharing that happiness. Theres no revenue model there. You will actively bankrupt yourself if you believe in the goodness of strangers like me. Whereas if you give a megaphone to the hatemongers, you will be flooded with bots and viral clicks and hate filled imagery and millions of impressions in a few minutes.
i will leave you with a rather strange yet true observation- some of the people whom I’d vouch for without question, incredibly nice and honest approachable engineers, tweeted exactly twice - once when they joined the org, and then on the day they quit.
1 reply →
> "Twitter is not a hate machine."
I agree. It's an amplifier. And the unfortunate thing is that many people are so different that it mostly amplifies distrust, dislike, misunderstandings, etc. -- and turns those things into hate.
Twitter is mostly a reflection of the way you use it. I had used 3 accounts to this day, and while i did encounter many hateful tweets, that's only a fraction of it.
Most of the stuff i encountered were very self centered, but not hateful.
I would love to be able to follow people for those things. But I can't. Because the same people's whose works and thoughts I like keep sharing news clickbait, socialite posers and hollow moralizing.