KD seems to work hard at taking people seriously - even people who have demonstrated over and over that they don't deserve it.
The desensitization class can be offered in the same strip mall as the Safer Drunk Driving class.
1 It's one of his traits that I find makes him endearing, even as I also find myself shaking my head.
Your rules are terrific for privileged people, especially people like us not trying to make a living while being a public figure. A journalist, or worse, pr person, though, can't easily hide from slander and abuse.
I'm on board with sending people to jail, but even better would be a recognition by Twitter and the rest that certain conduct should not be enabled, and so deleting tweets and cancelling accounts should be made pretty easy.
(I'm not suggesting moderation as diligent as you people do here on the troll thing -- diligence which is truly awe inspiring -- but an easy and fast way to get obvious abusers off the system. Closing accounts including IP address bans. This would only get the casual abuser, sure, but maybe taking out a bunch of casual abusers is worth doing . . .)
I think it's the demands of having to generate content- any content- hour after hour, day after day, that makes even the most likable pundits occasionally produce something so asinine that you wonder if their brain has been taken over by aliens. KD is far from alone in this.
Ogged's guide to twitter is spot on. But it remains too demanding of your time because you have to follow it actively to keep up with anything interesting. I only use it now if there's an unfolding event(TM).
OP:
I do wonder how much Drum's post is motivated by actually reading Twitter and trying to take people seriously
Not sure what this means: Drum is not talking about therapy for the trolls (which would involve taking them seriously), but for the recipients of their abuse.
It's sort of an interesting question: how does one go about developing a thicker skin?
What's irritating is that my and J, Robot's private BRCA fb group is constantly having photos taken down for being porn. Like, surgical photos of people's post-mastectomy reconstructions. Constantly, despite many complaints to FB. The media moguls manage to be hypervigilant in that context.
it remains too demanding of your time
It doesn't have to. Check in however often you have time for, scroll through the top fifty or 100 tweets in your timeline, open links that look interesting, close twitter. That's how I use it, and I love it.
how does one go about developing a thicker skin?
Growing up leftist in the south helps.
The flip side of having trolls banned is that the rules used to do so end up getting used by the powerful and established to silence people that they just don't like, and that Twitter is big and messy enough that people can make things up practically with impunity.
I think it may be the case that Twitter is just a fundamentally shitty platform that we should all write off as a mistake and move on with our lives.
10: Yeah, growing up, or into, any non-mainstream mode of being helps. Practice, practice, practice. True!
Lists are an essential feature in Twitter, and they do a lousy job on the UX for list management. When I go to twitter I start by looking just at personal friends/family. Then I check in on a list of people who link to interesting stuff. Then a list of news sources for breaking events. Then sometimes I look at everybody else, in a list I only scan when I'm bored.
I've tried using lists, but it's too hard to open them.
Maybe Twitter would do something if the case could be made that the cretins are hurting Twitter's profits?
Maybe the cretins have more market power than the anti-cretins.
OT: Yggles on the Bruenig Tanden Fracas is a lot better than Drum. Actually, MY is so good I have very little to add.
"But the fight here was only partly about the issues -- like the primary itself, much of the anger is driven by demographics, gender dynamics, political style, and a broader sense of procedural justice.
To pro-Clinton women, obnoxious behavior by male Sanders supporters is typical of a whole suite of social dynamics that keep women down in public life and that Clinton is struggling against. At the same time, Sanders supporters believe this focus on "Bernie Bros" and online harassment is itself a kind of cynical ploy to distract attention from the substantive issues and Bruenig losing his job is part of a larger pattern of pro-Clinton forces rigging the system against her critics.
A white man tweeting personal attacks on a woman of color, and powerful members of the center-left political establishment colluding to get a vocal leftist fired both strike at the emotional cores of the respective candidates' online supporters."
12.2 sounds about right. All the good functionality of Twitter (post links to interesting stuff and allow people to follow lots of people posting interesting links) is basically a blog plus an RSS feed. The bad functionality is retweeting and the @ function. It is cleverly designed to privilege people who consume vast amounts of other people's feeds and retweet as much as they can, with the most extreme, hypersensitive reaction possible. From a network analysis point of view this makes it closely linked and highly unstable which is how you get Twitter storms.
This isn't helped of course by the media taking Twitter seriously. I swear it seems like a good 10% of Guardian articles some days are "someone is WRONG on the internet!!!", mainly, of course, Twitter.
All the good functionality of Twitter (post links to interesting stuff and allow people to follow lots of people posting interesting links) is basically a blog plus an RSS feed.
Or Facebook, for that matter. Which has its own pathologies, but they seem to be different from Twitter's. I'm not on Twitter and continue to not see the appeal.
There's a lot more good stuff on twitter than I think nonusers give it credit for but you don't see it until you're in a network that works for you, and that might not happen before you give up on it. I find it useful, and rarely use @ or get @ replies that aren't related to stuff I use twitter for.
Of course, I also benefit from not being targeted for my gender. Although the gist of mainstream reporting on twitter mobs seems to be that white men aren't welcome there. @therealdonaldtrump will make twitter great again.
The tweet said the words of the prophets are written on the trending hashtags.
I like Twitter though it has killed some good blogs as some former bloggers have migrated to it. I tend to stay away from Twitter spats (twats? No, maybe not) and use it as some do "the other place" here. It's also good for some specialized communities I'm a member of like "film Twitter" or "special collections librarian Twitter"
And the "other place" is Facebook, right? I mean you're all not meeting in some sex grotto no one has told me about.
For all the annoyances of autocorrect, at least it knows me well enough to offer "grotto" as the most likely word to follow "sex".
And the "other place" is Facebook, right?
In the sense that there is Heaven and then there is "the other place"?
I mean you're all not meeting in some sex grotto no one has told me about.
Pace Mark Twain, my guess is there are more sex grottoes in Hell than in Heaven.
(I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking of Ellen Foley looking at the sidebar.)
24: 'Twat' is certainly correct. Adoption will have the added benefit of increased trans-Atlantic comedy opportunities.
OP: I'll repeat my and NickS's recommendation for This. It's nothing but interesting links, and you don't have to not read anything else because there is nothing else to read.
Twitter without lists would be worthless but with them, and carefully curated, it is how I keep up with a lot of specialised news through my "nerd" and "god" lists. Also, the very few genuinely funny accounts can mostly be found on my "amusing" list. But, yes, blogs and RSS were better for most things.
And there ought to be a filter that blocked all news stories that contained the words "took to twitter" built into any worthwhile browser or adblocker.
How about a browser extension that replaced "took to twitter' with "took to yelling out the window"?
It's like no one here has heard of Nuzzel. I follow a lot of people on twitter, including little clusters around publications I read a lot. And Nuzzel just feeds me the links that a lot of people posted in the last few hours. If I'm wondering what's interesting lately, Nuzzel is what I check.
As a white guy posting about non-controversial (business) topics (yes, privilege but is there any less boring annoying way to acknowledge that?), I find my twitter rules are:
1) read (and retweet) interesting stuff, which involves checking lists of i) people I actually know and ii) a few people I've deemed regularly interesting (saiselgy qualifies for me)
2) post interesting stuff I've found (this is why I took to twitter to avoid annoying personal friends with lots of wonky business and economics posts, though more of my academic field is concentrated on facebook either because of path dependence or because they can't handle 140 characters)
3) react to people I know
4) occasionally react to people I don't know, which once in a blue moon leads to a brief conversation
With just this taste, I can really see the attraction for journalists and elite opinion types to interact about emerging or hot topics. So I can imagine how terrible it would feel when a horde of rapey misogynists or modern-day hitler youth suddenly comes charging your way. No advice - I imagine if this happened to me I'd quit twitter or at least take a hiatus.
I suppose I would add, I can also feel where the twitter mobs arise from. When I'm reviewing what people I know posted I regularly have a quick reaction - that's wrong and you're stupid. Which I mostly squelch since I know them. If I can think of a way to tweak them gently, then I sometimes do that.
Actually, at the moment I'm beginning to think I should give up on Twitter because participating is supporting the whole horrible project. Especially, participating in good faith.
You can't have the pile-on nutters without an underlying level of real conversation to generate content to pile onto, in the same way as you need market-makers to have a stock exchange and, as an institution, it needs to figure out how to make it worthwhile for someone to take on that role. If they want anyone who isn't a spam robot or a psychotic egg to stick around, they need to look after us [I say this because I recently went through 1k followers] more - at the moment they can't/won't scramble the eggs and they won't/can't reward anyone sensible. instead they're constantly sending me e-mail trying to sell me ads.
[Big data and machine learning! - IF followers >= 1000 THEN send e-mail]
You can't have the pile-on nutters without an underlying level of real conversation to generate content to pile onto
Mouseover?
[I say this because I recently went through 1k followers]
Humblebrag