Computing Blog

I am getting sick of #GamerGate on Twitter, especially when I have online acquaintances on both “sides”.  There way too much toxicity swilling aroud the whole thing, to which people on both sides are contributing. It’s yet another example of the failure mode of “Hashtag activism”, and I know I’m not the only person who wonders if all this negativity is sucking out all the positive aspects of Twitter.

I’m not the only one who thinks this:

Dave Rickey writing in Zen of Design

Twitter is a breeding ground for social dysfunction, where you are lulled into a sense of community and comradery because everyone you follow and everyone that follows you are basically in agreement. The only things that can penetrate the bubble are “Outrage Porn” being retweeted into it, and attacks responding to outrage porn that is being passed around other bubbles.

There’s no room for nuance or in-depth discussion, and anyone who makes the mistake of trying will see their lengthy and thoughtful think-piece distilled down to a barely-true (if that) 140 character sound bite that will be used as a new piece of outrage porn.

David Auerbach writing in Slate:

People are accustomed to being irreverent in conversations with friends, but on Twitter, anyone who might take offense is likely to overhear (unless your tweets are protected, but why be on Twitter in that case?). At least you can go on Reddit without having the repugnant Philosophy of Rape subreddit being shoved in your face; Twitter drags everyone down to the bottom. No matter whom you unfollow, mute, or block, someone you do follow will sooner or later draw your attention to an outrage and encourage you to join the condemnation. On Twitter, negativity is viral.

Twitter didn’t used to be like this. I can remember the times when it was the virtual equivalent of the friendly local pub where all your mates hung out and you swapped joles and stories. I remember reading Robert Scoble’s blog post from five years ago claiming Twitter didn’t suffer from the “forum/chatroom problem” because your feed showed only people you’d invited to join the conversation.

We’ve lost that somewhere along the line.

Maybe it was when Twitter gave greater prominence to the notifications tab. Maybe it all went pear-shaped when they introduced the retweet, something Robert Scoble raised as a concern. Or maybe it was just that, like so many other places, Twitter was better in the early days before the rabble arrived, when most people were enthusiastic early adopters.

Twitter at it’s best can still be great fun; I love the rapid-fire exchanges between one particular group of friends who managed a mashup of The Shipping Forecast and Bruce Forsythe’s Generation Game (“…set of matching luggage 4, becoming 5 later…“)

But I can’t help feeling that either we all need to be smarter in our use of Twitter, with a little less “outrage porn”, ot Twitter needs to rethink some aspects of how the service works, so it amplifies the loudest voices a little less.