The tyranny of the supertweeter

The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession.<p>The platform is a journalist&#x27;s fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.<p>Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.<p>It&#x27;s the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don&#x27;t touch grass. The significance of Twitter users&#x27; opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.

A classic on this topic, more general: <i>Most of Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People</i>[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9rvroo&#x2F;most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9rvroo&#x2F;most...</a>

&gt;Twitter Is Not Real Life<p>Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality.<p>Quoting comment section of that article:<p>&quot;This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80&#x2F;20 rule. That&#x27;s the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world.&quot;<p>Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced &quot;real life&quot;.<p>Reminds me of &quot;hyper-reality&quot; defined by Baudrillard. Most people&#x27;s references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.

I keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech&#x2F;hacker people and routinely mute&#x2F;block those who think I want to hear their inane&#x2F;naïve political opinions.<p>And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.

I&#x27;ve said this before, and I&#x27;ve said this a lot. If you want discourse to be more representative of what people generally think instead of reinforcing and normalizing the most ideological and extreme opinions, platforms should curtail or rate limit user&#x27;s public posts&#x2F;comments.<p>If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind.<p>Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.

My first take was that a &quot;supertweeter&quot; is the opposite of a &quot;subwoofer&quot;.

I remember @pmarca kept a Twitter list of journalist accounts. It was a pretty good thing to browse, full of stories that journalists were trying to bring to light. Then in 2016 it became unreadable, just a 24&#x2F;7 TDS group therapy forum.

Pretty much anything in here applies to journalism as well. We see bias in <i>all</i> outlets. Nobody reports on the mundane day to day, only the exceptional events. This leads to a skewed view of the world, even if they leave other biases out of it. There&#x27;s also group-think where every network is carrying 90%+ of the same story (even if the takes are polar opposite).<p>I wouldn&#x27;t call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should understand and see through the biases. It&#x27;s a poor model given the realities though.

I think this overlooks the biggest issue. It&#x27;s not just that Twitter (and most online forums) aren&#x27;t representative of the public at large. It&#x27;s that these sites are driven by a tiny number of hyper-online turbo posters, many of whom are likely mentally unwell. It&#x27;s worth reading this post: &quot;Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People&quot;[1].<p>Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person to be active in multiple internet communities. I&#x27;ve been surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name and beliefs).<p>The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it&#x27;s easy to think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these problems).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9rvroo&#x2F;most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9rvroo&#x2F;most...</a>

&gt;The more interesting part comes when we use the &quot;how often do you use&#x2F;post&quot; questions to ask not what the distribution of users looks like, but what the distribution of tweets looks like:<p>&gt;Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as &quot;Liberal&quot; or &quot;Extremely liberal&quot;, those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets.<p>Where did this 60% come from? Did the author really translate survey responses along the lines of a user &quot;sometimes&quot; posting political content and uses Twitter &quot;a few times each week&quot; to a direct percentage of all tweets? This isn&#x27;t even getting into that &quot;using&quot; Twitter doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean posting tweets.

used to be a regular twitter user until a few things shocked me that a person could tweet thru out the day..eg., many coronavirus expert accounts...it seemed like personal accounts but how can they tweet thru out the day like serious &#x2F; data intensive tweets...7 days a week....felt these accounts were fronts, maybe they had a team of people contributing the tweets.<p>it really put me off when twitter started inserting suggested topics and tweets from people i really didnt follow to just fill out my feed. even more offputting was the suggested tweets came interspersed in the tweets of those that i follow. does it happen to others or is it just me because i only follow a few people &lt; 50.

Here is an example of how insane twitter is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;TristanSnell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1571629917372039168" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;TristanSnell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1571629917372039168</a><p>This person, a &quot;verified user&quot;, is claiming that this group of people is performing a &quot;nazi salute&quot;. This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced <i>at least</i> that many people.<p>The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that it&#x27;s actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the person making this claim isn&#x27;t either literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what he writes.<p>And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it massively amplified. Terrifying.

Twitter is one of the worst places I&#x27;ve ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets.<p>It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.<p>Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.

Infosec is partucularly horrible at this. You have twitter rock stars who do legit know their shit but being human means they sometimes lack the right perspective and experience which can lead to posts that are incorrect or lead people to misunderstand their opinions. &quot;AV is bad&quot;, &quot;VPN is bad&quot;, &quot;just convert your AD network to mac&quot; stuff like that and then you have their fans who sometimes don&#x27;t think for themselves.<p>The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives.<p>My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with &quot;cancel&quot; bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it.<p>If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).

I swear, I was thinking: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madisoundspeakerstore.com&#x2F;super-tweeters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madisoundspeakerstore.com&#x2F;super-tweeters&#x2F;</a>

&quot;On Twitter, you don&#x27;t see people; you see tweets.&quot;<p>Very well put.

Super tweeters are very likely narcissist, possibly psychopaths, if they are not actually a front&#x2F;shill&#x2F;bot. Think about the people in real life who always have to be the center of attention. Rarely you will find someone with a virtuous mission, who recognizes the power of a group. Most often you just find an emotionally damaged person who is trying to fill a hole.<p>Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.

I thought this was going to be about speakers.

anyone else disappointed this wasn&#x27;t about high frequency audiophile mafia?

I&#x27;ve admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it?<p>I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it <i>is</i> like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all.<p>I&#x27;m left a bit confused.

Is it only me perceiving that people is growing aware of the disadvantages of twitter, or at least its frequent use?

This blog does not inspire confidence when it cites studies which classify people from &quot;extreme liberal&quot; to &quot;extreme conservative&quot;. Much of the US left has rejected the term liberal for decades (check out Phil Ochs&#x27; classic &quot;Love me, I&#x27;m a liberal&quot;). You throw away way too much information when you just use people&#x27;s self identification on a scale like that.

Is this tool feasible?<p>Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow` user @A.<p>Ideally:<p>&gt; twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A<p>Edit: API Review Time!

&quot;Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as &quot;Liberal&quot; or &quot;Extremely liberal&quot;, those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets.&quot;<p>Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative. e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shy_Tory_factor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shy_Tory_factor</a>

So Twitter isn&#x27;t important except for:<p>* influential politicians<p>* journalists<p>* Jerome powell &quot;... though there&#x27;s some evidence that Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for ideas on monetary policy&quot;<p>* College educated people (94 million americans)<p>I don&#x27;t think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended

Every time I think about how to improve Twitter I inevitably conclude the simplest solution that generates the most net good for the world is to remove it from the internet. This is true for virtually all social media, however. The way these networking sites are set up is practically an invitation to bad actors and social engineers to manipulate large swathes of society, or at best, simply exploit people for advertising money. I don&#x27;t think the good from these sites outweighs the bad, not even close. People who use them tend to become miserable, misinformed, and distracted. I have faith the internet can supply a better alternative for disseminating useful, timely information than Twitter. God I hope so, anyway, because if Twitter is the best we can do then there is no hope.

As someone from one of the many countries with a right&#x2F;left&#x2F;liberal split, I really don’t like that American politics conflates left and liberal together.