Comment by eximius
5 years ago
Twitter is a plague on public discourse. We'd be better off as a society if it were never invented. If I knew how to put the genie back in the bottle, I would advocate for it.
5 years ago
Twitter is a plague on public discourse. We'd be better off as a society if it were never invented. If I knew how to put the genie back in the bottle, I would advocate for it.
It’s absolutely not. I don’t follow anything political, neither Obama nor Trump. Among 1200+ people I follow are all from AI/ML/biotech/space research. Most of them are academics. I throughly enjoy my feed and it’s my go to place to stay up to date as well as some fun nerdy conversations. Tweeter is a hammer, use wisely.
I didn't say it ruined your discourse in your niche. I'm not saying Twitter can't be good to any people.
I'm saying that as a tool for public discussion, it is vile.
it's easy enough - make it a paid-for service and regulate - read ban - free versions.
not going to happen because apparently people paying with their attention instead of dollars in manipulative ways is just fine. the argument goes that they can always not read it, but that's a false dichotomy in social networks and why i'd like to see twitter, google and facebook get labeled as utilities.
I'd love to see ISPs become utilities, which would be the first step.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, this represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, etc.
Google, the search engine, I could see being a utility. The rest is iffy. Now, how you disentangle that from the rest of the business... I can either see it being impossible or essentially already done (depends whether you think their existing ads system is biased in some way that regulations/utilit-ification would change - I'm not in ads, I wouldn't know).
Twitter and Facebook as utilities... I mean, I'm not sure I buy it. What kind of utility is it? A utility is something I imagine to be somewhat required by society. A search engine is kind of required in modern society. Facebook and Twitter are incredibly easy to do without.
POTUS is on Twitter. If you want access to his tweets, you absolutely must use Twitter.
Maybe it's a policy problem of the US in particular and politicians in general instead of Twitter/Facebook being an utility. As is, status quo is for me that they're utilities for that single reason.
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