<story><title>The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-deliberate-awfulness-of-social-media</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eksemplar</author><text>The only people I know with twitter accounts are journalists. One friend in particular has a hard time understanding how you can function without twitter.&lt;p&gt;I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner.&lt;p&gt;You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t.&lt;p&gt;I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired.&lt;p&gt;I like social media by the way, but I don’t think it has a lot of value when it’s done primarily with strangers. I mean, my friends use Facebook groups and events to organize stuff and it’s really, really good at that. We use discord&amp;#x2F;WhatsApp chats to keep in touch on day to day chitchat - which would be better in person but we live in different cities&amp;#x2F;have children etc. So that sort of social media is great.&lt;p&gt;But talking with strangers? I mean, I’m home in bed with the flu right now, and we’re having this conversation, except I can’t be sure you’ll ever read what I post or if you’ll find it interesting or reply, and even if we do get to have a talk, we’ll likely never have another one. So it doesn’t hold a lot of real value aside from wasting time, and that’s kind of what twitter is all of the time.</text></item><item><author>sonnyblarney</author><text>&amp;quot; you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem.&lt;p&gt;The press needs to take more responsibility for this as they are the primary enablers of Twitter.&lt;p&gt;Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion, and often used as the basis for some kind of rally bad straw-man argument the author wants to make.&lt;p&gt;I think Twitter will wane but it won&amp;#x27;t go away as those who make their business making noise, either celebs or those who report on them, will just keep going with it.&lt;p&gt;It may become purely PR providence though - I can see regular people giving up the notion of actively tweeting entirely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t use twitter for &lt;i&gt;general&lt;/i&gt; news. Mute the news sources if you have to. If it&amp;#x27;s big enough it will bleed over into your feed anyway. Often I can work out what the news is by reverse-engineering the jokes about it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s much more interesting for highly specific news. I&amp;#x27;ve got some accounts I follow for local news, some for gamedev news, people doing interesting tech, art, jokes, and a few &amp;quot;commentators&amp;quot; who are excellent enough to be worth reading on their own. It &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; be great for kibitzing on live TV events too.&lt;p&gt;Mind you, these days I post very little original stuff too. The internet is just too much of a live-fire zone.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-deliberate-awfulness-of-social-media</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eksemplar</author><text>The only people I know with twitter accounts are journalists. One friend in particular has a hard time understanding how you can function without twitter.&lt;p&gt;I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner.&lt;p&gt;You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t.&lt;p&gt;I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired.&lt;p&gt;I like social media by the way, but I don’t think it has a lot of value when it’s done primarily with strangers. I mean, my friends use Facebook groups and events to organize stuff and it’s really, really good at that. We use discord&amp;#x2F;WhatsApp chats to keep in touch on day to day chitchat - which would be better in person but we live in different cities&amp;#x2F;have children etc. So that sort of social media is great.&lt;p&gt;But talking with strangers? I mean, I’m home in bed with the flu right now, and we’re having this conversation, except I can’t be sure you’ll ever read what I post or if you’ll find it interesting or reply, and even if we do get to have a talk, we’ll likely never have another one. So it doesn’t hold a lot of real value aside from wasting time, and that’s kind of what twitter is all of the time.</text></item><item><author>sonnyblarney</author><text>&amp;quot; you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem.&lt;p&gt;The press needs to take more responsibility for this as they are the primary enablers of Twitter.&lt;p&gt;Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion, and often used as the basis for some kind of rally bad straw-man argument the author wants to make.&lt;p&gt;I think Twitter will wane but it won&amp;#x27;t go away as those who make their business making noise, either celebs or those who report on them, will just keep going with it.&lt;p&gt;It may become purely PR providence though - I can see regular people giving up the notion of actively tweeting entirely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>1337biz</author><text>Twitter truly feels like a dangerous mixup of mostly journalist, social activists and social media gurus, who all reaffirm their existance on the platform.</text></comment>