> Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.
Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?
>I disagree. Diverse input results in better conversations – less of an echo chamber, less black and white thinking, more visibility for other viewpoints, more empathy.
> And that's okay. I see it differently. We all take different understandings of things. The tweeter should have considered this when posting the tweet.
I find it hard to accept this. I've offended people, unintentionally. Heck, there are still a few times that to this day I don't understand why the person was offended (I mostly do understand when they explain themselves).
We are human; I don't think it is reasonable to parse everything 140 characters that ever leaves our mouths or fingers and correctly predict how any/every person in the world might possible interpret it.
I mean, do you know anyone, ever, that has never offended somebody? It seems like an impossible standard. People shouldn't brake to late and rear end somebody at a stop light. People shouldn't ski too fast on a ski slope and fall. They shouldn't trip and fall. They shouldn't talk over somebody during a conversation. But we do them, now and again.
I loathe posting in conversations like this because it is almost inevitable that someone somewhere will misconstrue what I am saying. "Look, Roger is sticking up for racist posting!" Uh, no, anything but, but someone somewhere is going to say that. I'll probably get lucky and that won't develop into a Twitterstorm, but who knows? A good part of me says just delete this and don't hit reply.
But I don't want to live in that kind of world of perfect expectations. I'm going to try hard to express myself well, but you (you=public, not you the poster I'm replying to) have to understand that modelling the minds of others is a difficult and mistake ridden field.
> Can anybody make a good argument as to why Twitter (in its current form) isn’t a major detriment to society?
Basically no one actually uses twitter. I only know one person in real life who uses twitter.
Twitter's problem is that 'media types' really like twitter, for one reason or another, and tend to blow everything that happens there out of proportion for off-platform engagement.
Personally, I really like twitter. I carefully curate my Twitter experience to follow people I'm interested in, mute people and words I don't care for (it's great never having to see "NFT" on twitter!), and block people who are actively harmful. I'm left with a pretty positive experience that has good community and funny jokes. That's how I use it.
> a) it is transitory and people won't tend to remember it and harangue you about it years later
I think this is a feature and not a bug. I don’t want to see a carefully curated representation of the past.
There are plenty of other social networks for you if that is what you want.
Or you could contribute anonymously if you want to say something transitory.
> people who don't like what you're saying only have a limited ability to harass you.
I think that’s true on Twitter as well for the most part.
What Twitter does that is different is it still allows the people you don’t like to participate in the general conversation.
Certain groups hate this and want to deny other groups the right to speak.
> surely we deserve better tools to prevent ourselves being harassed.
I think the problem is people want to benefit from the upside of having a public conversation but still want to carefully control it and I don’t think that’s healthy for society.
Again, if you are happy to forego the upside you can always contribute anonymously.
> Yes, those tools will be abused in some cases; but all tools can be abused
> My view is that Twitter has a big problem with harassment. I want to know what Twitter plans to do about it.
I don't know if Twitter does that,but they could have a function so that people only receive tweets from people they follow at first place,while keeping their tweet public.
Anyway, people take twitter way too seriously. It's the internet, anonymous people are going to be mean.
> I don't really understand sentiments like this - Twitter is just a means for people to communicate
The problem is in the way it is designed. The shortness of the tweet limits context and nuance. This makes it easy to find something to be outraged over. Now add the re-tweet that makes it easy to spread the outrage everywhere. No, Twitter is optimized for outrage and conflict.
> Is that ability so bad? In real life, people can refuse to socialize with you too
It depends on what you think Twitter is for. I think it’s the equivalent of the public town square.
In that context I don’t think it’s appropriate.
If you start a public conversation it’s ok to walk away from it (equivalent of ignore) but it is not ok to stop certain groups you don’t like from continuing the conversation (equivalent of a real block).
In a sense you don’t own the conversation and once you have made a contribution everyone else is free to talk about your contribution.
This is a big reason I can't stand the culture of twitter. When I interact with someone on Reddit, the two of us are on equal footing. There are many other strange Reddit specific cultural details to keep in mind when commenting, but the two of us are just two mostly equal users.
I once disagreed with someone on twitter that I didn't realize had a huge following and was easily upset. They retweeted my response and called on their tens of thousands of followers to back them up in our disagreement. I deleted twitter that day.
Invoking an offended identity group is a necessary condition of getting something to fly on Twitter.
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