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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service.

I don't know ... Twitter as a news aggregator was (could have been) a public good. I think it was probably the least bad out of the group of: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat

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A news aggregator potentially could have been a public good. But it's impossible to have adult discussions about the nuanced, difficult topics of the day in 140/280 character sound bites. This caused the loudest, most obnoxious, immature, and simplistic takes to rise to the top.

Like a drunken argument at a house party between undergrads, Twitter promoted discourse that was literally sophomoric, and it was a direct cause of the toxic culture war environment in the US today.

I guess?

I always felt like Twitter (or any social media, really) as a news aggregator was a classic example of quantity over quality. Once upon a time, we'd wait a day for journalists to make sense of what was happening, and they would boil it down to a series of pyramid-structured article that you could read as far into as you want depending on how much detail you cared to know. And then you could skim through that over breakfast or during your coffee breaks and be, for all practical purposes, just as informed with less effort.

But this new iteration of the attention economy demands frequent shallow engagement, and in order to serve it journalists are now asked to basically just straightpipe information into articles in a race to be the first to trend on Twitter or Facebook or wherever. And if you frame it that way then I think that Twitter might actually be the worst of the lot because it created the greatest sense of haste.

>and in order to serve it journalists are now asked to basically just straightpipe information into articles in a race to be the first to trend on Twitter or Facebook or wherever.

That isn't going away. If Twitter goes bankrupt, something else will play that role. And this trend has been happening for generations. Books/Scrolls -> Newspapers -> Newspapers + Telegraph ('wire services') -> Radio / TV / Cable 24/7 news -> Internet ... If some technology provides a faster way to share information and news then people will make use of it.

Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it.

>Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it.

Can you elaborate? Isn't that a good thing to have those in the corridors of power directly communicating with the global public? I'm not a big fan of the Ayatollah of Iran, or Putin, but I want to know their perspective on current events, even if that perspective is 'regebait' and full of 'misinformation' ... and we had that, for a little bit of time, and we're losing that.

What is the alternative? That news is filtered through some cabal of the 'chosen ones'?

You know how we often talk about how publicly-traded companies' executives seem to have a tendency to make incredibly short-sighted decisions whose only clear motive is the immediate-term impact on stock price?

It's like that but for politics.

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