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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

> and if these combatative tweets bring attention to their PR campaigns than that's a plus

I'm not convinced that's a thing. I see a lot of twitter styled activism and I'm not sure what the impact is outside of maybe some anecdotal events.

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of course a single young person can't do much other than speak (which is after all supposed to be the point of twitter), but on the aggregate it does shift the conservation. Over the last few years people have become more aware of amazon's business practises and it is starting to be reflected in politics, on both sides of the isle.

Sure, a tweet chain like this isn't going to change the world, but it's better than nothing or to pretend you can have a genuine discussion with Seth "fc ambassador" your friendly neighbourhood employee who is literally reading talking points off a page

I mean just genuinely look at these accounts, there's a guy who looks like 20 and claims to have grandchildren, then there's someone switching gender mid-conversation, it's like something out of a Kafka novel. In East Germany people used to refer to the increasingly bizarre existing social order as Realsozialismus, I think we've entered Realkapitalismus.

I get how how an individual might feel they can't do much more or better than nothing. I would argue though that if they choose just to tweet and so forth, they're not doing much at all.

I'm still not sure that there really is much of a change with twitter style activism.

I suspect everyone who is inclined to belive a thing already are in their own protected circles (to use a google+ term ) and they're not changing much. The bots are the only crossover I suspect.

Personally when I am on Twitter, I unfollow a lot of the higher activity activist types (even the folks I know), because honestly even when I agree i don't care to see folks yell at each other.

I suspect "there's nothing else I can do" is still a net 0 in the end as far as change goes, well other than the aggravation of a twitter spat.

I'll add in my two cents.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Amazon's product quality overall was in the toilet due to low qualify manufacturing and co-mingling genuine products with knockoffs in the warehouses, but I didn't really have anything to back me up other than products that I was unsatisfied with. Then HN threads and comments started mentioning the same thing. That stuff has been spreading like wildfire.

I'd argue that voices in unison on Twitter would have a farther reach that a niche community like HN. I know people in my circles have been even more skeptical of products sold on Amazon for these very reasons.

> on the aggregate it does shift the conservation.

I think this is totally overblown. Reddit thinks they did it. Twitter thinks they did it. Politicians think they did it. News organizations think they did it. People in the streets think they did it.

Sure everyone contributes, but except for some limited circumstances, I'm going to give the least credit to those of us on the couch and put the most credit at the feet of the investigative reporters and researchers who provide more than mob shame and anecdotes.

Why, that's how mobs work, of course! We've see plenty of instances of mob justice on twitter.

https://theweek.com/articles/787650/how-twitter-facebook-are...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...

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