Comment by PaulHoule

Nothing positive can come out of Twitter for McLuhanite reasons.

Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if you see him in video you see him listening to people. Even people who aren't inclined to agree with him talk to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me." High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by this. [2]

Even though Twitter does provide a back channel and a Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don't see that user listening and in fact the user interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that conversation for outsiders in the way that the heavy Twitter user doesn't get. Not least because the heavy Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't post links to Twitter on HN, you might see a great discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see a single sentence floating in space without any context)

On video though, the person who listens listens visibly, you see the microexpressions in real time as they react to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job but constituents only see them talking!)

The above is a second order concern compared to the general compression of discourse in Twitter which is talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a day traversing graphs to follow discussions and understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization increases, there is more and more talking and less and less listening, and the possibility of real social change diminishes.

Burn it down.

[1] https://darkfactor.org/

[2] for once good NYT content that isn't paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...