Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure you finished the piece. The author says this:

    Luckily, Twitter has an amazing feature that will
    instantly remove negativity from your stream. It's
    called UNFOLLOWING. The next time something feels a
    bit too snarky: Unfollow that user. Before you know
    it, you'll have a really nice place where people have
    interesting and quirky conversations.

So you seem to be agreeing with him, not disagreeing.

To me the larger take-away points are these:

1. We should not idolize these people.

2. We should try to be better ourselves.

There's an additional point: People may not realize just how negative the come across on Twitter.

I'm sure some people do, and do so on purpose, and if that's their choice then great. Follow or unfollow.

But if you find yourself turning to Twitter to vent you may not realize that, to many people, all you do is vent and complain. It may only be a small part of your total personality but if that's all you're showing to some people that's what they'll use to judge you.

A corollary to this might be that people should not be so quick to judge others based on some small sampling of their comments or tweets.

There's a very good chance they've said and done much more than what you've just happened to come across on the Intarwebs, and you've only seen a small part of that, and even that has been filtered though specific media and circumstances.

Perhaps apply Postel's Law to social interaction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

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