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Comment by part1of2 | Hacker News Reader

I was just thinking about that too this AM while working on my car. No one is on twitter to have a conversation, it’s a room full of screaming people. I wouldn’t walk into that room physically, so why am I walking into virtually? It’s time to quit

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It would be funny to get a bunch of people from Twitter that have been shouting at each other together into a room and ask them to re-enact their 'conversation' in person.

That would make for an interesting youtube video! Realistically you could get actors to read the lines. Although the text that someone wrote could be orally said in many different ways; it might be challenging to accurately portray the conversation.

It's been done for YouTube comments before. There's a series about it: https://youtu.be/MxrWuE5qC5c

people from Twitter that have been shouting at each other together into a room and ask them to re-enact their 'conversation' in person

Mike Tyson says: “Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”

The format and discoverability are the biggest problem. Any conversation is hidden away in accounts tweets. If you don't know the specific account then you won't know what's being talked about. There's also no community unless your already famous. It's essentially anonymous.

Reddit I think has the potential for the best discussion platform. The people are the biggest problem, and upvotes are a good idea, but doesn't seem to work in practice

IMO discoverability is an anti feature. Having random people drop in constantly means you can never have a real community or users that are even familiar with the rules.

I love things like IM groups/discord servers because they are somewhat hidden and hard to find. You get invited by a friend or see a link somewhere and join and when you do join you tend to stick around for a while.

"No one is on twitter to have a conversation, it’s a room full of screaming people."

It's not a room, but a city. You've clearly been spending time in a bad part of town. Ruthlessly curating lists of people/accounts worth following will transform your experience.

Twitter is certainly more palatable with a ruthlessly curated feed. In fact I think it's a mandatory action or you'll simply stop engaging with the platform. So anyone who's an ongoing twitter user is guaranteed to have a highly filtered view of what's posted.

So in the end the tailoring capability makes itself an obligation, which leads to users floating in their own opinions and information bubble, leads to ... interesting ... outcomes when the real world comes knocking.

This is markedly different to how it has been before with specialist forums etc. There, while there was coalescence around particular topics, the range of opinions and personalities participating was otherwise quite open and the ability to filter was limited (or rather, elective in a way that twitter feed curation is not). There was certainly some self-selection at play but it's intensified massively with the shift in dynamic.

Facebook has the same issue as twitter of course and I suspect many other platforms as well - One mitigating approach is to try and keep conflicting views on your feed but it quickly becomes so tiresome that your engagement with the platform as a whole drops.

I'm not sure there's a good approach other than to go full wargames.

Even most "good" people/accounts aren't really having a conversation.

Tweets are almost always very bold statements with little nuance.

Sure, but that's true IRL too -- and is mostly moot if you enjoy scanning your highly-curated lists of Twitter handles to see what certain smart and/or interesting people have to say.

Ruthlessly curating lists of people/accounts worth following will transform your experience.

But who has time for that? The OP said he was thinking about it while working on his car. A real life thing that I expect is a lot more satisfying than staring at phosphor being "ruthless" to strangers.

> "who has time for that?"

Given how many hours of daily television are consumed by your average 1st-world person, just about everyone.

Twitter's UI is hostile to conversation. It took me ages to figure out how to read replies (vs. make a reply myself) and on mobile navigating around different replies is horrible, even worse than Reddit's attempt to make this hard.

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