[HN Gopher] As a former social media analyst, I'm quitting Twitter
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As a former social media analyst, I'm quitting Twitter
Author : madrox
Score : 49 points
Date : 2020-11-01 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (madrox.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (madrox.substack.com)
| im3w1l wrote:
| > The rise of fake news, the alt-right, and other extreme social
| factions coincide with the rise of viral platforms for that
| reason.
|
| Reality check: Twitter didn't cause the Uighur situation.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > The tools that users have to manage their information intake
| have not matured as quickly as virality tools. This is mostly
| because social media's financial incentives are in advertising
| and analytics, which are at odds with user curation.
|
| The purposeful marginalization of RSS takes on new meaning in
| this context. RSS consumption enables control. Great for users.
| Not so great for other more power-hungry entities.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Even Craigslist has dumped RSS:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310
|
| :-(
| TheChaplain wrote:
| I think what most fail on when it comes to Twitter, is following
| the right people.
|
| Personally I follow a bunch of vendors of products I like, a
| whole ring of C++ and developers, as well as a few game
| developers. So I have a quite pleasant and informative Twitter
| experience because I am selective.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| I moved almost entirely to lists for this reason, but with
| mixed results.
|
| I follow too many people to categorize all fo them, so my hack
| is to wait until someone tweets into my main feed. Then when
| they do I add them to a list and then unfollow them. Ideally
| that means my main feed is empty.
|
| The problem with this approach is that a lot of smart people
| are political right now. I'm political and so I appreciate this
| and know where they are coming from. But it does make it hard
| to have a single-purpose reading experience. For example, my
| feed of basketball twitter accounts is great when there is a
| game on, but it actually not all that different from my list of
| political/news accounts the rest of the time.
|
| But overall, I think this is the approach to take.
| onion2k wrote:
| There are two challenges with this - first, following people
| who focus on one thing, and second, focusing on one thing
| yourself.
|
| When people tweet about a professional interest like code, and
| their other interests, and family things, and random fun stuff,
| your timeline gets noisy. Likewise, if you follow people
| because you like code, and more people for your other
| interests, and you follow your friends, and fun stuff, then it
| gets really noisy too.
|
| I follow a lot of people for frontend dev things, but also some
| more people for wildlife photography, and local Northeast UK
| tech scene stuff. I had to cut down from following about 1000
| people at peak to 300 because I couldn't keep up _at all_.
|
| If you can focus who you follow and what you use Twitter for
| then it's good, but for most people who have multiple interests
| it's not. Lists help a lot, but you need discipline to use them
| well.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Same experience here. If you exclusively follow smart,
| interesting people, it's pretty great.
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| Yeah, and I also wish there was a way to filter out content
| from select people who I follow for their subject matter
| expertise, and I'm not interested in reading about their takes
| on politics. I don't mind that they're wanting to share those
| views, but I wish I could follow just their subject matter
| content. And by the same token, it would also encourage people
| to be able to post those non-subject matter tweets, if they
| knew that people wouldn't have to unfollow them if they
| preferred to avoid politics. Allowing people to choose to
| bifurcate what they follow a person for enhances the network, I
| think.
|
| And I should say, it's not even necessarily about politics. I'm
| not a huge sports fan, and in the same way, I would like to be
| able to unfollow posts about sports, etc of friends on
| Facebook.
| jjb123 wrote:
| Reddit is great for subject matter. Not perfect but actually
| gets better and better every year.
| kortilla wrote:
| As long as you're okay with politics leaking in. There
| isn't a sub of any significant size that doesn't become a
| reflection of the leftist echo chamber of the larger
| community.
|
| Mods can surely delete comments that outright state
| anything political, but they don't control the fact that
| the votes are controlled by the community and the votes
| favor things that fit in with a particular political world
| view.
|
| All this to say, a vote-driven platform with an
| overwhelmingly one-sided user-base is not a great place to
| host a community.
| waheoo wrote:
| Oh yea, I wish I could block the whining that happens here on
| hacker News, it really turns me off the platform. Many
| threads I open and the top comment is just some tangential
| moan about something barely related to the subject matter.
| hnracer wrote:
| This isn't a solution to your exact problem, but I find that
| muting specific keywords helps
| yoavm wrote:
| The article isn't saying "my feed is boring", or even "my feed
| is full of extremists". I have a feeling the guy knows how to
| choose who to follow.
|
| The problem he's raising is that at a social level, extremists
| voices spread much faster that sane ones because the way
| Twitter (and others) are built. The the tool of virality, once
| used for marketing, is now used to cripple down society. Sure
| you can pick who to follow, but as you can see from stories
| like pizzagate more and more people are having hard time
| choosing the right people to follow, and that makes our world a
| dangerous place.
|
| He's not leaving Twitter because he didn't his experience. He's
| leaving because he thinks it's harmful to society and he
| doesn't want to be part of it.
| BenGosub wrote:
| This. Very well put.
| wott wrote:
| That is a bit of a narrow view.
|
| Twitter has escaped Twitter. It is now everywhere, intertwined
| with other 'social' media, with other Internet forums, with
| traditional media.
|
| You (we) cannot escape Twitter's nefarious effects any more, it
| doesn't matter who you follow directly on Twitter, it doesn't
| even matter whether you are on Twitter or not. Your 'timeline'
| may be clean and interesting, but you're still exposed to
| Twitter's virality.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Indeed. This started in the Arab Spring, and made it very
| clear that Twitter is a political accelerant, the fuel to
| everyone's Molotovs. However, because it's so determined to
| be content neutral, it offers no guarantee of the results of
| your revolution.
|
| Changing who you follow won't clear Tahrir Square or Kiev
| Maidan.
| marsrover wrote:
| Agreed. Twitter has an impact on your world whether or not
| your personal feed is ok.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or if you're on Twitter at all.
| elevenoh wrote:
| Anyone have a quality the 'elevator pitch' type message on why
| someone should leave twitter for something like substack?
| ecshafer wrote:
| I don't even consider substack as a competitor to twitter. I'll
| admit I am biased since I have never seen the appeal of
| Twitter, and every single time I have used it is has left a bad
| taste. But Substack seems to mostly be a way for journalists
| and writers to independently write. The writers I follow on
| substack write long form essays, and are usually too heterodox
| to exist in mainstream media. Its the next evolution of blogs
| really, and more serious than medium. Twitter is 140 characters
| of nonsense that has produced zero good.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Yet Another Quitting Twitter Story
|
| Not much more content in the actual piece. Seems to be very
| fashionable these days to either quit social media or traditional
| journalism for substack but honestly I feel like it resembles
| self-advertisement combined with mediocre pieces more than
| anything of value.
|
| The argumentation like in this piece is usually that there is
| some bad incentive that these independent platforms avoid, like
| virality in this case, or being beholden to someone else, but I
| don't see how this isn't true for independent publishing.
|
| If you run your own platform you potentially still want it to go
| viral if you want to monetize it (which I assume why people post
| it to sites such as HN or reddit, read social media), and you're
| beholden to your readers in a sort of patronage like
| relationship.
| jsonne wrote:
| Twitter used to drive me crazy. I had an account but didn't login
| for years at a time. My use has gone up significantly by:
|
| 1. Only following industry people and chefs. Basically just work
| and hobby. Anyone that strays into politics or social issues is
| hard cut. Not because they're wrong for doing so, but because
| with an anxiety disorder I'm not equipped to handle the constant
| bombardment of that. 2. I got a plugin that blocks the trending
| topics. 3. I have a keyword blocker for anything politically or
| socially related.
|
| With that my experience has improved dramatically, but I really
| only was able to curate that experience because I work in the
| social media marketing industry. Regular users aren't as well
| equipped in the slightest. It's great because now I can use it
| for networking and my interests in a way thats much better than
| Facebook groups (which is what I formerly used to make industry
| connections).
| netmonk wrote:
| So he escaped to a safe-space ?
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Can someone please explain to me how subscriptions work on
| Substack?
|
| I just spent 5 minutes clicking around and still can't figure it
| out. How much is it? Where does my money go?
|
| Reading a piece on Substack then clicking "Subscribe" only to
| have them demand my email address with no additional info is
| really off-putting.
| f_allwein wrote:
| Apparently, it's free at first, but publishers can choose to
| charge later:
|
| ,,Build your audience on Substack, or bring them over. When
| you're ready, you can add paid subscriptions."
| part1of2 wrote:
| I was just thinking about that too this AM while working on my
| car. No one is on twitter to have a conversation, it's a room
| full of screaming people. I wouldn't walk into that room
| physically, so why am I walking into virtually? It's time to quit
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "No one is on twitter to have a conversation, it's a room full
| of screaming people."
|
| It's not a room, but a city. You've clearly been spending time
| in a bad part of town. Ruthlessly curating lists of
| people/accounts worth following will transform your experience.
| FooHentai wrote:
| Twitter is certainly more palatable with a ruthlessly curated
| feed. In fact I think it's a mandatory action or you'll
| simply stop engaging with the platform. So anyone who's an
| ongoing twitter user is guaranteed to have a highly filtered
| view of what's posted.
|
| So in the end the tailoring capability makes itself an
| obligation, which leads to users floating in their own
| opinions and information bubble, leads to ... interesting ...
| outcomes when the real world comes knocking.
|
| This is markedly different to how it has been before with
| specialist forums etc. There, while there was coalescence
| around particular topics, the range of opinions and
| personalities participating was otherwise quite open and the
| ability to filter was limited (or rather, elective in a way
| that twitter feed curation is not). There was certainly some
| self-selection at play but it's intensified massively with
| the shift in dynamic.
|
| Facebook has the same issue as twitter of course and I
| suspect many other platforms as well - One mitigating
| approach is to try and keep conflicting views on your feed
| but it quickly becomes so tiresome that your engagement with
| the platform as a whole drops.
|
| I'm not sure there's a good approach other than to go full
| wargames.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Even most "good" people/accounts aren't really having a
| conversation.
|
| Tweets are almost always very bold statements with little
| nuance.
| tayo42 wrote:
| The format and discoverability are the biggest problem. Any
| conversation is hidden away in accounts tweets. If you don't
| know the specific account then you won't know what's being
| talked about. There's also no community unless your already
| famous. It's essentially anonymous.
|
| Reddit I think has the potential for the best discussion
| platform. The people are the biggest problem, and upvotes are a
| good idea, but doesn't seem to work in practice
| jcims wrote:
| It would be funny to get a bunch of people from Twitter that
| have been shouting at each other together into a room and ask
| them to re-enact their 'conversation' in person.
| TravHatesMe wrote:
| That would make for an interesting youtube video!
| Realistically you could get actors to read the lines.
| Although the text that someone wrote could be orally said in
| many different ways; it might be challenging to accurately
| portray the conversation.
| baxtr wrote:
| I feel the same about LinkedIn and Insta nowadays. There,
| everyone is excited, happy and successful ALL THE TIME.
| throwaway7281 wrote:
| The most strong signal I get is that substack is putting in a lot
| of money seemingly to bootstrap content.
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