Quitting Twitter
For a post called &quot;Quitting Twitter&quot;, I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really <i>cool</i> things about Twitter. I think there&#x27;s something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later!<p>The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it&#x27;s impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on &quot;dunking&quot; people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go.<p>I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I&#x27;ve had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.<p>Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they&#x27;re tiny blogs; by and large, you don&#x27;t write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you&#x27;re responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That&#x27;s the source of <i>so</i> much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it&#x27;s also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!<p>Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it&#x27;s part-and-parcel with the format of &quot;public conversation.&quot;<p>God knows I&#x27;m part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN&#x2F;reddit comments every day. It&#x27;s an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to &quot;dunk&quot; people, but if there&#x27;s one thing the internet has, it&#x27;s no shortage of idiotic comments, and it&#x27;s hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone&#x27;s talking about how women don&#x27;t deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever.<p>I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that&#x27;s where Twitter, by and large, <i>really</i> fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around &quot;look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren&#x27;t they stupid?&quot; It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.