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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

I have tried to read Twitter a couple of times, but I fail every time and I stopped. For example I'd go to the page of someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins to see what they post, but I see heaps of retweets and answers and general noise and chit-chat totally out of any context. I'd like to see the original tweets by them, but it seems there's no such functionality. Or to sort them by "popularity" or date or something. Nope, can't be done.

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> Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins

Twitter actually ruined my opinion on these individuals.

Neil deGrasse Tyson writing smug bitchy tweets about slight inaccuracies in Hollywood sci-fi movies. Painted him in an entirely different light to me

Richard Dawkins tweet after tweet of him just arguing with stupid trolls, you're supposed to be a respected academic yet here you are wrestling pigs in the mud because for some reason you feel you have to win every argument.

That's how Dawkins treats his career as a fundamentalist atheist.

> Richard Dawkins tweet after tweet of him just arguing with stupid trolls, you're supposed to be a respected academic yet here you are wrestling pigs in the mud because for some reason you feel you have to win every argument.

The world is full of "stupid trolls". If you ignore them bizarre things would happen like people starting to believe AGAIN that the world is flat.

I think that there are enough of internet warriors that someone like Dawkins doesn't have to involve in those arguments.

Also making someone change his mind on the internet most of the times is close to impossible, so it's usually pointless.

It's not only that. People making searches can end up finding those tweets. If the only thing that they see is the wrong statement of trolls, they can think that those statements are true. On internet, repetition is assumed as real so if only the wrong things are repeated, then people will accept them as truth.

> Neil deGrasse Tyson writing smug bitchy tweets about slight inaccuracies in Hollywood sci-fi movies.

Are you new to the Internet? Because Tyson is hardly an outlier.

I'm not familiar with Tyson's Twitter feed, but I've noticed that lots of playful critiques are interpreted as joyless and pedantic.

The YouTube channel CinemaSins comes to mind--various filmmakers (using Twitter) have attacked CinemaSins of vicious nitpicking, even though that's the whole point of the series. Tyson even did some recordings for various episodes and he seemed fairly understanding and good-natured about the flaws he exposed.

Again, I'm not familar with the tweets in question, but I just felt like pointing out that sometimes people interpret ALL criticism as a malicious act even when it's dispassionate or tongue-in-cheek.

I used to think that I just didn't understand how you're meant to use twitter. I found it totally unusable. Turns out that it wasn't my own shortcoming, it really is unusable. That said, I still don't understand what the experience is for someone who actually has an account.

I don't know how long it's had it (because I don't use the web UI), but it now has separate views for "Tweets" and "Tweets and Replies".

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