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Comment by lanevorockz | Hacker News Reader

What is Twitter ? isn't that the Hate promoting platform ? Its been nearly three years I threw it under the bus and my life improved substantially.

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Your experience with social media largely depends on the accounts you surround yourself with.

I had an identical experience to yours on Facebook, but my Twitter accounts are carefully curated by topic and their timelines are generally excellent.

This was true before Twitter decided to inject tweets from people you don't follow into your timeline.

set to latest tweets instead of home and mute these phrases https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...

it's a noble effort, but it misses the point.

altruistic view : if you fix their service on your end, it invalidates portions of their feature A/B test -- a weaker signal means that it'll be less likely that they remove whatever feature offended you / made the service worse.

pessimistic view : they won't stop being abusive to the user until the abuse shows up on their financial reports. Stop being a patron, they'll be forced to change their ways.

Tweetdeck on desktop (as well as using private lists on their mobile app) provide excellent solutions to this problem.

OP could be referring to the overwhelming impact of Trump on Twitter and his penchant toward bullying and violence.

I don't log into Twitter. I don't "surround myself" with any accounts. Yet, the platform is inescapably branded by their inability to police their own content and I could not avoid if even when I tried.

They are clearly talking about their personal experience and mostly parroting a cliche at any rate.

> I don't log into Twitter. I don't "surround myself" with any accounts.

Then how are you observing " overwhelming impact of Trump on Twitter "

Mmmk.

> my life improved substantially.

then Maybe it has something to do with you?

The impact of social media on mental health has been a topic of regular discussion. Given what we’re learning about how social media hijacks our brain’s reward systems, tends to fuel anxiety and negative thoughts about ourselves, and give the user a distorted perspective of the world around them, no, I doubt this has anything to do specifically with the parent commentor.

There are dozens if not hundreds of articles that explore this [0], [1], [2], etc.

- [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/how-t...

- [1] https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-me...

- [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/

> hijacks our brain’s reward systems,

Maybe for the ppl who are not capable just blocking the offending site or unable to control themselves from eating 5 big macs with big gulp in a single sitting.

Yea lets blame twitter , mcdonalds or whatever from stopping ppl from living their lives.

I blocked twitter, FB ect in my router software. Whats such a big deal, i don't understand.

For sake of argument, let’s for a moment go with your assertion that this only impacts weak minded people (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary).

What is your conclusion? “Weak minded” people don’t matter? How do you even define “weak minded”?

Alcohol is extremely harmful to alcoholics. I personally don’t have an alcohol problem, but should that imply something about the experience of those who do have alcohol problems?

> Yea lets blame twitter , mcdonalds or whatever from stopping ppl from living their lives.

It’s funny you mention McDonald’s. Both companies literally have groups of scientists focusing on making their product as addictive as possible. We should absolutely blame these companies - the general consumer doesn’t have a chance against the growth hacking and french fry oil optimization.

That doesn’t mean we don’t each have a personal responsibility to ourselves, but we should not underestimate the power of social media and junk food.

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