I quit Twitter 1 year ago this week and couldn’t be happier about my decision. The time distance has made me realize how banal the whole thing is. I used to think I was staying in the loop of what society is thinking about. In retrospect, it was really just the loudest 1% and didn’t represent what anyone I know in real life was talking about.
The internet in general is prone to “the loudest 1%” problem, but Twitter is something special where it’s the craziest and loudest 0.01%.
It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
It's not so much the internet as it is websites with voting and “like” systems.
I notice it too on H.N.; it would not surprise me if 75% of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more extreme.
The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment, dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone to impulsive angry decisions than the latter.
I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading.
It exists on many websites because that userbase wants it.
Virtually all websites that have them such as Reddit, Facebook, and Youtube are known to promote isolated echo chambers and extremist views, but that's what they attract so it's not going away or they would loose their userbase.
I do not believe that Reddit was started with this mentality, but at it's start wanted to promote decentralized leadership, but by now they must have realized this and their current policy seems to be to capitalize on their current userbase, which is known to favor and enjoy echo chambers. — H.N. is to a certain extent spared from this because it only has one page rather than attempting to divide itself into semi-isolated communities, but it's still quite obvious in distinct threads that one can be upvoted for saying the same thing one can be downvoted for in another thread, and that in general threads are filled with agreement.
Ironically, in this very comment train, people are mostly agreeing with each other that the voting system creates too much of an echo-chamber.
I don't agree with this take. I run multiple small Reddits, though several are restricted which means no one but me can post new content (though other people can comment).
There are a lot of small Reddits that are off the beaten path. It's a diverse ecosystem and you aren't required to participate in the larger subs which may well be "an echo chamber" because they were started for a specific interest and you either are into that or not and if not, it's not really the place for you.
I don't think you need to be fighty and actively oppose every single "popular" opinion to provide a different take. I say a lot of unpopular things on HN and, so far, they haven't banned me.
I'm older than I used to be. I'm more inclined to pick my battles and I have a different understanding of how to introduce other ideas. If you do it right, you can get taken seriously sometimes though it's a slow process and not for the innately impatient or the folks looking to grab karma or the folks wanting to make a splash.
> I say a lot of unpopular things on HN and, so far, they haven't banned me.
They certainly don't ban for opinions that would be upvoted in another thread, but one will be downvoted, and H.N. seems to limit posts to five per day to any user with any recent downvoted comment.
Just yet I was limited because a single one of my comments received a downvote, but that comment has now been upvoted again, so I am no longer limited. — This does not seem like a particularly good system to me and scares people from saying anything that goes against the mentality in any particular thread.
> I'm older than I used to be. I'm more inclined to pick my battles and I have a different understanding of how to introduce other ideas. If you do it right, you can get taken seriously sometimes though it's a slow process and not for the innately impatient or the folks looking to grab karma or the folks wanting to make a splash.
There are certainly strategies and diplomatic tactics that can aid one, but I do not feel one should need to do so if absence of such would leave one upvoted in another thread depending on what way they mentality of the thread swings, which is of course vicious, since this system further diminishes dissent.
seems to limit posts to five per day to any user with any recent downvoted comment.
I seriously doubt this is true.
I generally stand by my right to my opinion. I have worked at figuring out how to do that without making every single comment a hill to die on. It's taken time and effort. I used to be a walking, talking train wreck waiting to happen and I still have personal challenges to being me and not being overwhelming amounts of drama for existing.
I don't like drama. Accusations that I say and do things for dramatic effect or similar are inaccurate understandings of who I am and what motivates me.
I view HN as an opportunity for growth. I have had the experience of feeling like "a big fish in a little pond" and I generally gate it.
I enjoyed being here at first because I was a little fish in a big pond and was free to just enjoy the opportunity to engage in meaty discussion. And then that turned into drama and I began trying to figure out why and yadda.
These days, it's less drama than it used to be. I'm still trying to find my sea legs here with no effective role models, but I still prefer to see it first and foremost as an opportunity to engage in meaty discussion and to whatever degree it still serves that function, it's life enhancing.
Upvotes, downvotes, etc are all niggling details. The opportunity to enrichment my mind without paying tuition or leaving home etc is extremely valuable to me and has caused me to be thick skinned about a great many things for nearly twelve years now.
Why do you think this is not true? This is something that is quite often discussed and just happened to me.
One comment I made today had one downvote, and I was met with the dreaded “You're positing too much” message, but shortly thereafter someone else upvoted it again to bring it to 1 again, and I could post freely again.
Your opinion seems to be conditioned upon that this is false, but even if it were false, votes simply have a habit of scaring people into saying something others might disagree with. And even Reddit in a less extreme fashion limits one to 1 post per hour on any subreddit where one has negative total karma, which is certainly less extreme, but one can very easily receive negative karma for simply disagreeing and being well within Reddit's rules in how one phrases such disagreement. Simply going to say, r/movies and saying “I disagree, I personally did not like this film at all and thought it was overrated.” too much is all it takes to be limited to one post per hour on r/movies.
> Upvotes, downvotes, etc are all niggling details. The opportunity to enrichment my mind without paying tuition or leaving home etc is extremely valuable to me and has caused me to be thick skinned about a great many things for nearly twelve years now.
Even if these websites did not limit one in any way for being downvoted, they still give visibility based on upvotes, and the psychological effect on others is real, which leads to such places slowly but surely becoming a monoculture which attract more and more users that simply desire an echo-chamber which will lead to more and more users that do not like it, or simply desire a different ech-chamber, to leave.
A real problem I have with r/manga on Reddit is that really only one specific genre is read and discussed there, because all threads about anything else obtain no visibility due to the voting system, the genre is controversial in most other paces, but anyone who criticizes it there is downvoted.
I've been here a lot of years. I was rate limited at one time. I'm not currently.
I framed that very carefully as my opinion and not an assertion of fact.
It's possible to be Dutch and strongly opinionated on HN and in good standing (not rate limited).
Maybe you are right and I'm wrong. It ain't no big thing. I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm just making conversation and trying to be helpful, which is something of a bad habit of mine and habits die hard.
> "I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading."
Exactly why I read the comments before I click the link to the article, and why I'll read the article (assuming the comments give me a valid reason to) before commenting about it. ;)
Could we try "influence" boosting posts? Some kind of combination of "this person has X karma, commented on Y post, that yields the same result as upvoting in Z fashion" and normal upvotes?
I don't know that this would solve the above described problem (and it will likely introduce other issues in the social fabric of HN), but it might be interesting to see the outcome...
I personally think the best way to rank posts is by simple activity myself, the system that DeviantArt uses, a simple recursive algorithm where the top post is the one that had a reply in one of it's children of the same level twice, but the tree is maintained.
So say we have a these posts:
A
- B
- C
- - D
E
- F
- - G
- H
Say that a new post, I, be made, which is a reply to H, then after that the tree would appear so:
E
- H
- - I
- F
- - G
A
- B
- C
- - D
By replying to H, I has now pushed H to be the top child of E, and also pushed E above A.
This results into posts whose children have the most activity statistically are more visible, but if an inactive post be replied to, it will briefly be at the top and more visible, and any new post will also start at the top.
Essentially, it is the treed evolution of the traditional linear thread system where threads are simply ranked based on most recent replied. DeviantArt uses this system and it's boards do not feel as though they be an echo-chamber and are full of people challenging each other's views and trees seem to be more balanced out rather than al replies being under the top post, which became the most visible due to upvotes such that others are ignored completely.
This seems identical to futaba/chan-style "bumping" which is imo easily gamed without having some other variable (logarithmic time fall off or something) AND (has significant spam protection OR has significant moderation/user reporting system). It is usually paired with a post limit as well, so that eventually old conversations fall off and disappear and/or get archived.
Most traditional forums never had a timer system, and it did not seem to be needed.
It indeed resulted in some threads being alive for months, but that was only because the discussion in it was healthy and interesting, and new input on the same subject continued to be had.
They typically also do not have an archival system and often præfer that one revive an old thread that was dead for years rather than make a new one on the same subject, as in doing so all the old content becomes visible again for a fresh perspective.
I agree that often it is quite interesting to receive new replies with new input to a thread that died off three years ago.
I am not seeing these fora being gamed at all: in order to game them, one must provide content interesting enough to draw replies. — Visibility is purely a function of the number of replies, not of agreement.
I like the simplicity of it, but it could very easily be a victim of "forum sliding", where new posts are made with the purpose of moving undesirable topics out of sight.
That feels like it would just turn into some type of toxic popularity contest where prominent posters that get a lot of engagement get boosted to the top, irregardless of the actual quality of said engagement. In addition it may also create some type of gatekeeping effect, though in my opinion that's not exactly a bad thing for niche communities such as this.
Was JS Twitter itself toxic? Because if not I don't see why you wouldn't just follow the relevant accounts and not see any of the stuff the article talks about.
The problem is that you can follow lists of people related to, say, VueJS (how these lists are create I don't know, but they are more or less accurate), but you don't subscribe to their VueJs posts, you subscribe to their twitters.
Google Plus got this right in reverse, in that you could organize your people into circles based on your interests and then you could choose which circles to share any post with. If they had done it so that I could subscribe to you for either everything or just things about VueJS, than they would probably still be around.
In fact if somebody is trying to start a Twitter competitor, there is a space for a copy where you must select at least one tag for your posts and where I can then subscribe to intersections of tags and people.
It doesn't even have to be anything about politics, but Cpervia tweets about cryptography and FreeBSD. I have no interest in the latter, but I have to skip over the tweets that he makes because there is no good filter for them.
Now suppose It was somebody posting about compilers and upsetting pictures of aborted fetuses. In theory I could still skip those, but it would be far harder.
Yes, even JS Twitter is extremely toxic by my definition. But more importantly there is no group of people you can follow to keep the ratio of JS related content above even 10%. It’s not a reasonable way of following a topic.
I have had a simple rule to unfollow anyone who posts off topic, and honestly it works pretty well. A lot of people have accounts just for talking about whatever topic they are interested in.
It does mean occasionally unfollowing someone who has otherwise great content, but often it’s retweeted by someone else I do follow, and anyway - it’s worth the cost.
Same. I keep my Twitter feed extremely on topic of what I enjoy/want and it's a great experience as a result. Anything proud gets culled via muting specific keywords or unfollowing.
You cant filter topics, like I followed kenji from serious eats on twitter for food stuff but kept posting about politics. I guess he eventually quit and just posts food on instagram now.
Even if you could filter topics somehow, many users would do whatever to bypass the filters to get their political messages through them.
It would reach the point where not trying very hard to bypass the filters would make you liable somehow: "you, a JavaScript developer, should've tried harder to bypass the politics filters when you posted your pro LGBT tweet. What are you, an anti-Semite?"
JS is actually okay. Horrible, horrible language, but like PHP there's some decent stuff in it. The only bad things about JS (other than JS itself) are the "write everything in four layers of frameworks" (but that's more a webdev thing than a JavaScript thing) and "four billion node dependencies that re-implement JavaScript built-ins" (bad, but not "extremely toxic").
I created two accounts, one for political screaming and the other for "sane" follows, like programmers and scientists and artists etc. I ended up only paying attention to the screaming Twitter just deleted it.
I used to do the same, but then realized I wasn't missing anything. What about JS related discourse is remotely important and what kind of stuff doesn't make it onto other channels?
> It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, & retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead, never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus, something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing.
I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I still think the network of people model is incredible. But also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years. There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the defining problem was that there was much less interesting stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works, way more really good libraries. And there's way way less inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas.
I think a big thing is that Twitter can often repræsent itself as though what many outside of it call “Twitter views” are more mainstream than they are.
4chan, for instance, also comes with rather niche views, but does not attempt to convince one that it's views are anything but niche.
Being immersed in Twitter, and many other websites known to create “filter bubbles”, eventually might make one believe it is the mainstream.
In fact, it is not so dissimilar from how I think U.S.A. culture works; it is often noted how often inhabitants inside of it loose perspective of how idiosyncratic U.S.A. cultural memes are nothing more than that, as the people there often phrase them as though they be of a more global, even timeless nature.
At a personal perspective it is best to quit most social media channels including Twitter for a daily surfing craving because only a handful people whom you care & whom you matter the most would be there waiting on social media. Most of my closed people miss the personal touch, some free time jumping around to the ground and spending time at some pals place and hate to talk on Social media while we can do many more things out of the Internet box. It's what matters. History of our online usage can be used by advertisers but not by our loved ones.
I didn't need to before Covid, but our government decided that it was okay to change rules (drastically), on a day-to-day basis, then when they got called out for changing them with less than 24 hour warning, decided that 48 hours was fine. If you didn't follow the news, you could get caught up and have to pay a not insubstantial fine, or more realistically you were planning to do something that was deemed safe enough some days earlier.
An older example: if you didn't pay attention to the news on 9/11 you risked being stuck in the airport for a very long time.
So yeah, there are situations where you do need to follow the news. Not often, but two global events have happened in my lifetime (3 if you count the fall of the Berlin wall) where you really did need to pay attention to the news.
Maybe some sort of exponential back-of is warrented? Say you check the news and if nothing relevant happend you check in again the next day, then you skip a day, then two, etc. When an event happens where you need to follow the news (say a local flood), you go back to an hourly checkup.
The final thing I have noticed is that the news you need to follow are mostly very local. What happens in other countries is, relatively speaking, of no importance to you.
I stopped reading the news since a few years, mainly because of the low signal/noise ratio and because it's time-consuming.
I assure you, you still hear about the big events without issue. Just your usual day-to-day is more than enough to hear about the important news very quickly. There's no way you could have missed 9/11 or the Covid lockdowns. I mean, I don't care a bit about soccer and I still heard within hours when my country was eliminated from the Euro.
And whenever something particular sounds like it deserves your attention you can go read about it on whatever news website. But that's fairly rare.
I'm not being glib here, how do you link 9/11 and Covid regulations and Berlin wall to really needing to pay attention to the news?
Check your government website if you want to know what the regulations are today, or check your airport and airline sites before you leave for the airport if you're worried about delays. You don't need "news" for this.
I don't think you need to over complicate it. There's nothing wrong with checking the news daily if that's what you like, or following some particular stories or events important to you even more regularly. A compulsion to keep checking, spending hours a day on it, or some fear that you need to check or you'll miss out is where it could negatively affect your life.
I don't need to read the news to discover covid, it was on hacker news long before it hit the media and I don't need them or the government to read/understand an exponential graph.
I needed them to keep taps on the government and explain the ever changing rules in a better, more clear way. It is not important for the government to make the rules simple, understandable or appreciable so they didn't.
That is not overclomplicating it, btw. That is responding to reality.
If you were that concerned exactly following the rules that change on a daily basis and are so difficult to decipher, why would you trust a journalist to get it right for you? What country, by the way, I'd like to see these crazy rules for myself.
And by over complicating it, I'm talking about this exponential backoff algorithm. You can read the news if you want, don't feel bad about it. Nothing bad is going to happen and you won't miss out on much if you don't though. And I promise you you would spend more time scouring the news for 9/11 type events than you would spend stuck in airports due to said events because you didn't read the news.
This is me too. And the me of 2 years ago would have been aghast about that. But I now finding myself missing pretty major news cycles regularly because eventually you learn to trust the fact that you can "catch up" at any point in time. I've really enjoyed letting news happen and not getting caught up in the immediacy of it.
I've stopped. I check my local news, I still read HN daily, but I don't watch or read any TV or national news. 99.9% of it has zero impact on my day-to-day life.
I find very little usefulness in the national and international posturing, blaming, and virtue signaling that makes up most broadcast, cable, and print news.
The problem is only the more informed and better educated people take news slowly and form opinions slowly. But the masses are on these social platforms getting influenced by hot takes, and then they go vote with their poorly informed but strongly held opinions. This ends up affecting the rest of us who prefer taking in non-extremist long form information, since our society is effectively controlled by those engaging in social media. So it feels like we too are forced to engage in these terribly designed social media platforms in order to not lose our [political voice / country / whatever]. In a way, the existence of these social platforms with huge user bases and network effects drastically reduces the value of traditional media. What’s the point of keeping myself informed if only what happens in social media changes my world?
If it's that important, either I'll get an emergency broadcast text or it won't be televised. Otherwise, a family member will call me or I'll hear about it from other people.
What would you say were the big news hits of the last year? Also why do you need to be there soon enough?
Reflecting for myself, I used to feel the same way, but quit news about 6 months ago and have never felt happier. No longer am I sinking valuable hours into something that didn't bring me happiness or help me better myself.
Outside those who perform certain uncommon jobs, paying attention to non-local news more frequent than quarterly, at most, isn't of much more value than keeping up with a soap opera, or a reality singing competition, or reading tabloids. It's a low-value entertainment pastime. Fine in the same way those other things are, but not more laudable. People trick themselves, or get tricked, into thinking keeping up day-to-day or week-to-week matters and that doing so is somehow improving, but it doesn't and it's not. The time would almost always be better spent—if being better-informed or a better citizen or whatever is the intended outcome—reading a book.
That's even more true when the news takes the form of something like Twitter.
If you enjoy it, keep it up, but don't think it somehow capital-M Matters.
I don't know; I had concrete plans to quickly leave the US if Trump had actually retained the presidency after losing the election. I think it would have been a smart move, and wouldn't have been possible without close attention to the news.
One of the nice things about Biden's presidency is how much less attention the news seems to merit, these days.
The thing about "there's been an actual, successful coup in the world's (for now) only superpower" or anything similarly unusual is that it tends to break through simple disregard for the news in a hurry. Something like that seems to happen once a decade, or maybe once every five years at most, and are of the "say granddad, where were you when..." variety. Even the studious news-avoiders might wish to watch history unfold, and even they will rarely miss it unless they actively try to, given how everywhere information is now.
Meanwhile, did you find any of the Trump-related news for those four years (hell, over five, really, counting the election) particularly actionable, in an "I really needed to know that right this minute" sort of way? I kept up with all of it (it was entertaining, for sure) but never did, personally. Even CDC guidance and such during the pandemic filtered down to state and local ordinances by the time they mattered much. Mask mandates quickly resulted in posters at store entrances, and most provided free or cheap masks, especially at first, so there was little likelihood of being caught out there. I anticipated panic-shortages before the news caught on when I saw a way-above-normal number of household paper products in shopping carts at the local bulk store-by the time it was in the news or became a meme a few days later, the shortages were already a problem. Some help that would have been—and realistically, we'd have probably been OK if we'd been affected by them, we'd have figured something out with only very little inconvenience. Regardless, even a news-avoider would have realized that they should maybe pop in slightly more often than usual to see what's up, specifically, with the whole pandemic thing, well before it had much effect in the US.
Most big stories still don't actually matter. Pulse nightclub shooting, or the one in Vegas, or the Boston Marathon bombers? Quick news mattered—locally. Living several states away, I could have found out a month later and it'd have made no difference. Assange extradited, US pulling out of Afghanistan—US invading Afghanistan, for that matter? Russia invades Ukraine? Brexit? Libyan revolution? "Immigrant caravans"? I care because I'm a bit of a politics and news junkie, but if I'd ignored those the harm to my life would have been zero. They're not local events, for me, and they're just not that important to my day-to-day life. I could have found out about Brexit a year after the vote, would have made no difference (there's a joke in there about how long that process has taken).
9/11 disrupted air travel and phone service nationwide, but was of the rare "you could hardly miss it" variety so one was unlikely to encounter those problems before becoming aware of it.
I'm actually having trouble thinking of another event in the last 30+ years, in the US, that wasn't local and that had a "light cone", if you will, of actual effects on my life that hit in less than a week, and for which foreknowledge was in any way actionable. Typically, they never "hit". If they do, then finding out when that happens is just as good.
Anything curated and not subject to engagement algorithms. Every publication has a newsletter, or you can just check their websites directly once per day.
