This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.
Doing the same on X will just get you banned for whatever reason Elon feels is best 'for the community'.
> This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.
This is actually a big reason why 4chan never messed with my sanity and blood pressure opposed to say Reddit or Twitter. It feels like on 4chan there are some people who are completely off the rails, but they can be insulted and called out. On Reddit or Twitter, it feels like almost everyone is “somewhat of the rails” and they all concentrate among each other, as in almost every Subreddit has some collectively held belief that simply appears as nonsensical to people outside of it, but as much as politely disagreeing will get one blocked by that specific user in many cases, or just banned from the subreddit so it's far more obnoxious. Also, it feels like arguing against an endless current whereas at best on 4chan it's two waves that clash into each other of even size.
4chan is “arguing against an idiot”, Reddit and Twitter becomes “arguing against idiots, being surrounded by them, and very often not even really being allowed to argue lest one be banned”. It's a very frustrating experience that makes one's blood boil.
The pompous tone of your comment exemplifies what actually makes most social media platforms awful, which is how people act on them. Inconsistent moderation is everywhere, and most people getting banned from X absolutely deserve it. If you posted something like this on 4chan, people would quickly tell you to get off your high horse (in more vulgar terms). The nice thing about an anonymous message board is that without a name or upvote count attached to your name, you don't get positive reinforcement for putting on a show of moral superiority, and struggle sessions via petty call-outs or pile-ons are not a thing beyond the lifetime of a thread. And on the other side of the same coin, people are not afraid of damaging their reputation by being uncouth, which helps not take anything too seriously, and enables direct feedback instead of passive-aggressive behavior.
HN really corroborates the inverse principle here - giving everyone names and karma doesn't seem to generate consistent, thoughtful contributions. It rewards apologia, groupthink and complacency, oftentimes the only interesting or unique viewpoint in a thread is flagged or karma-bombed to the bottom because it's a green username. The big HN "experiment" feels like it's stalled out, we've been getting the same results for years now. This website garners the reputation it has because everyone with power is out for themselves. There is no desire to accept change that threatens the collective interests of the tech industry, look at how HN reacts to regulations and war crimes and misinformation that technology inherently necessitates. It's thread after thread of hand-wringing, "it's not your fault" and then everyone is off to nerd-snipe each other over the semantic definition of a sorting algorithm.
Let HN, Reddit and X (or whatever it's called now) be a lesson to everyone - privately owned platforms are all just different brands of echo chamber. There is no obligation to change an echo chamber that makes you money or repeats what you want to hear.
Everything happens on X now.
Even when I’m forced to go back to Reddit, all the niche subs I follow just post back to X links where the actual discussion is happening.
most of the niche subs I follow have banned X links, and every time I get on X I just see a bunch of bots or things I have no interest in
I dont understand why twitter is so prevalent in the tech community; and it's not like you can just 'not use it' - you are at a true disadvantage if you aren't on twitter because of how much discourse around new tech, private equity, etc transpires on it.
I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
I don't know. I think you can just not use it. You might miss out on the daily chaff but anything of note will get reposted elsewhere.
The feedback mechanism on Twitter allows you to find useful discussions of current affairs in less popular topics. Can you find a good discussion of current events in agribusiness on Reddit? No. On Facebook? No. But if you open up Twitter and search for Arthur Daniels and you'll find something useful.
So, when the manager at a company wants to publicize, he has nowhere else to go.
> I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it.
Reddit is worse. Facebook is worse. Bluesky is a community that couldn't stand Twitter changing it's party line, so it's worse. Mastodon is complex and suffers from the same problems as Bluesky.
Like it or not, Musk did choose his acquisition well.
Let me make it clear because I don't want to come across as biased - Reddit, Facebook and platforms like it are 1000% worse and or just as bad, no contest from me on that part; the dialogue just skews a different way depending on the platform.
To the first point though, I guess I just don't understand how such niche and useful discussion ended up on twitter and remains there out of all places. It seems strange to find someone pushing moon-landing-is-fake conspiracies on the same site nuanced discussion occurs on some hyperfocused topic
It's all about the technical features of the platform. Twitter's design is less likely to encourage conformity, so you can find far more insane content in it, but it's also less likely to encourage people to pointlessly discuss popular topics over and over.
Twitter allows for the existence of small ad-hoc communities numbering a dozen people at most, without a designated leader. Facebook groups, subreddits and mastodon instances require that a community has a designated dictatorial leader, be it an admin, a moderator or an instance owner.
The most powerful method of expressing approval - the re-tweet is likely to be used to promote interesting statements. Blind adherence to conformity isn't interesting. Crazy conspiracy theories are interesting, but so is specialized knowledge. All you have to do is ignore the former, (unless conspiracy theories amuse you).
I think that’s just an artifact of twitter’s history. It was “normal” (increasingly algorithm slop driven) website until roughly 1-2 years ago when it was bought out and became maga slop.
Remember twitter came out in like 2007 when only tech people were on the internet.
>What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
As far as I've ever been able to tell, Stallman's positions are much closer to socialism. Perhaps you're thinking of ESR?
They are orthogonal. If you plot him on the political compass, he'd be libertarian-left.