ah. that’s a valid point. i use twitter (and like it a ton - no FB for me, so there’s that). i don’t know why they have been dragging their feet about how easy it is to harass and bully people on twitter, but i’m hoping they do something soon. i don’t expect twitter will be going anywhere, but it’s really terrible they are not on top of this as priority number one right now, and the longer they continue to not handle this problem the more people are going to do like she did and leave.
3 Likes
It’s not a party. It’s a livelihood. It’s a marketing and promotion tool for writers to reach their audience, but also to share with each other and not get shitcock cuck feminist bitch shouted at you until you get tired of filtering out their voices and playing whack-a-mole with unhinged assholes (as any feminist attracts online.)
11 Likes
I’m slow to that realization. I recognize it as a garbage dump, but I reconnected with a penpal I hadn’t written to in 20 years when he miraculously responded to a tweet without knowing who I was (I have an alias), and I enjoy good, however brief, interactions with a handful of people I’d not have met if it were not for Twitter. So, I recognize it as a garbage dump but in my dumpster dive, I’ve found some treasures.
I don’t engage with trollies, shills, unhinged, or “brand-builders” there.
12 Likes
That’s part of the issue, you don’t need to directly “engage” for them to receive harassment.
7 Likes
Twitter seems to work okay as long as you are nobody and you keep it that way. There have been a couple of times, though, that I have thought of something to tweet and then have thought, “Oh, what if people thought this was clever and retweeted it?” and decided to keep my mouth shut. Don’t get noticed.
19 Likes
I must be doing it wrong.
I’m on twitter. My username is the concatenation of my real first and last names. My profile picture is a photo of my face. I’m a white man.
I’ve got a bit over 1000 followers. There’s a selection of pornbots in my follower list, but they’re mostly real people that I know from professional circles.
My tweet counter is only in the handful of thousands (is it counting tweets or ‘tweets and replies’? Not sure.)
My tweets are about 2/3 technical musings/questions/answers and about 1/3 jokes or personal things (the occasional picture of an offspring or congratulating my spouse on having completed a marathon)
I definitely get value out of Twitter, and I’ve yet to interact with a single Nazi.
Am I doing it wrong? Do the Nazis ignore me because of my face? Or am I just engaging with the right people, just like I do in the real world?
I don’t dispute that Nazis are on there, but twitter is not a useless cesspool at all in my experience. Same goes for reddit. I go there for two reasons: (1) a long form version of the same technical communities that I engage with on Twitter and (B) for the sorts of things that wind up on boingboing’s front page 6-12 hours after they’re on reddit’s.
Why are so many of you running into a wall of assholes in your social media worlds? Is it not a matter of curation?
2 Likes
Do you post about womens rights? Do you post about politics?
11 Likes
I tweet stuff I think is clever and I don’t get noticed. With some terms I use a nonalphanumeric character to substitute for vowels so bots don’t harvest my tweet, e.g. sc**l md**.
6 Likes
[quote=“generic_name, post:11, topic:92274”]
I understand the importance of free speech , but it’s like if someone was giving a public lecture and an army of hecklers showed up to drown him/her out[/quote]
I get it, lots of assholes out there. And when anonymity is factored in, it gets worse by magnitudes. However, Ms. West comparing a heckling mob of idiots to genocidal lunatics who literally murdered millions doesn’t help her case. Nor does wearing a shirt that manages to be mildly offensive to the same kinds of people that she’s complaining at length about.
There’s nothing to be “weaponized” about free speech. And it’s not too hard to imagine an army of hecklers drowning out a certain president-elect and being whole-heartedly supported. Twitter can moderate its content as it sees fit, for better or worse. If the discourse is too unpleasant - and god knows it can be - disconnecting from it seems like smarter alternative than actively calling for censorship.
1 Like
Maybe because you’re not targeted for your religious, gender, sexual orientation, or race? Just a thought.
25 Likes
And that’s why I’m not on Facebook, and haven’t opened my Twitter app in months.
2 Likes
I haven’t seen sexual harassment in public for years. My circle of friends includes plenty of men who are polite to women. I avoid people who are not like that. But this is not so surprising, and neither is it surprising that the women I know could probably all point to several examples of harassment from the past week. I’m not a target, and not associating with bad types is something I can choose to do. Plenty of people don’t have that freedom.
7 Likes
The heckling mob she is talking about is composed of a loose alliance that includes people who freely identify themselves with those genocidal lunatics who literally murdered millions. She’s not talking about figurative Nazis, she’s talking about actual Nazis.
And she did, and that’s what she’s advising everyone else to do as well. Looks like we can all be happy.
22 Likes
只输入中文。 你永远不会达到字符限制。 我不知道这是否正确，因为我不会说中文。 但是，我有这么多的空间，我可以输入任何东西。 紫色猴子洗碗机。 LOL我甚至不在乎我在写什么。
Body is clear, if you speak Chinese. I don’t care what Discourse says.
7 Likes
You just need to write some of the Chinese in lowercase.
12 Likes
I don’t know if my post read as snarkier than intended (I cut it down from what had become an overlong ramble), but what I was driving at was that Twitter tends to be treated as different from other kinds of online posting in a way that doesn’t make sense or ring true to me.
People have always posted copiously on the intertubes. Obviously I do it myself. But I don’t kid myself that posting on bing bong is a business decision; I have psychological reasons, not all of which are healthy. And I know that’s equally true when I post on Stack Exchange, much as SE would like to persuade me that generating content for them is Serious Business that will Help my Career. Twitter seem to have made that pitch very successfully to creative types, like my sister who believes she “has to” cultivate a Twitter presence because of her writing and standup comedy. But or does she?
I think it’s healthy to take stock of your online activity, and quit things that are a bad deal (which Twitter sure sounds like). But even if you really are on Twitter just for professional reasons, I think it’s still more accurate to view it as, like, some kind of unregulated dodgy group therapy exercise. The financial language in the quote got up my nose because that validates Twitter as a part of the workplace. It shouldn’t be.
Do you post about womens rights? Do you post about politics?
I don’t.
Do you believe that twitter is worse than, say, standing on a street corner holding a sign about topics that bring out the trollies?
It seems plausible to me that the awfulness encountered in various venues might be proportional to the exposure of the postings, and not a measure of the venue itself.
For what it’s worth, I run into considerably more assholes in real life than I do on twitter, and I “engage” considerably less IRL.
1 Like
Here’s the thing: you can’t get rid of the Nazis. Well. You can find and murder them all, I guess, but you can’t filter the Nazis because most of the Nazis aren’t really proper Nazis in jodhpurs and jackboots, but are in fact sociopathic teenagers who, really, have nothing else going on in their life but to work at defeat your efforts at censoring them. The result is that you get to pick whether you go long on Type I errors or Type II errors, the first means that you will start banning people left and right for stupid reasons (known in the trade as the “Scunthorpe Problem”) and the only people around are in fact those with enough time to game the system.
The second means that it’s going to be Nazis as far as the eye can see. And ISIS, too, come to think of it, which seems to have a real affection for Twitter.
The fact of the matter is that the solution isn’t to filter the Nazis for Twitter, it’s to travel to, roughly, 1980 and stop the complex web of causes that gave us so many Nazis today to begin with.
2 Likes
Don’t forget subject matter.
That’s is absolutely the safest combination on the internet - a white hetero guy talking about tech. The more anyone diverges from those things, the more of a target they become, the more likely they are to draw in attention from third parties who will send trollies their way without any action on their part. A white guy talking about tech, though - you have to go out of your way to provoke ire.
15 Likes
You can’t. The Chinese are always shouting.
6 Likes
