Maybe it was just the people I interacted with, but the more time I spent on twitter the more I became convinced that a lot of people were proud of being lonely and miserable. It was big part of why I quit.
There's a danger here of stereotyping, taking people we disagree with, sticking them in a big bag, and then sticking a label on it.
Having said that, there are emotionally ill people in the world. While some people focus on the psychopaths, there are also people who are depressed, sad, angry -- and want to be heard. They continue feeling this way no matter what your interaction with them is.
If they are only 1% of the Twitter population, and Twitter has 100M subscribers, that's a million people. These people are emotionally injured and will remain so no matter how anybody responds. In fact, for some, interaction may exacerbate the problem.
I don't know how you deal with that using automation. Seems like whatever you did would just make the problem worse.
> there are emotionally ill people in the world. While some people focus on the psychopaths, there are also people who are depressed, sad, angry -- and want to be heard. They continue feeling this way no matter what your interaction with them is.
I don't think I agree that emotionally ill people feel the same way no matter how others interact with them, if that's what you mean. In fact, how others interact can have a large effect, IME. These are human beings who, like you and me and all the others, have many complex factors guiding them; they are not automatons, not solely creations of their illness.
