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OK, Now It’s Real: Twitter Is Bad
I have been on Twitter now for quite a few years. I follow mostly political folks who are right leaning as well as a few other sites that I respect in one way or another. I have about ten people following me (which suits me just fine) and I very rarely ever post or re-tweet anything, I’m just a lurker. It has all been very good fun being a lurker but over the last three or four months I have become increasingly exhausted by the speed at which information, if you call it that, cycles through the platform. I guess what I am saying is that I was looking for a way out. I just can’t do this anymore….
I have always followed Jonah Goldberg on Twitter. It used to be that we agreed on many things but as time has gone on I have found that, how to say it: Came for Jonah. Stayed for the dogs. I have a very sweet Basset Hound of my own so I did a search and there are many many Basset Twitter accounts. I started following a few and, for a time, I had some very nice Basset Hound pictures to make me smile through all the political madness. Then those Basset accounts started re-tweeting and I started following more accounts with pictures and over the last month or so I have found that I am following more dog accounts than political ones. Joy!! this could be the solution: gradually reduce the political accounts and just follow dogs! I was happy with this arrangement for a time…..
Don’t get me wrong, the pictures are great. But I have discovered that many of those Bassets have political convictions as well. There is a dog from Ontario (that’s in Canada) that is not only radically left wing but also hates Americans. There is another Basset that lives in Oregon that has very strange ideas about sexuality and wears a rainbow collar. Another hates Trump with a white-hot flame. On the other hand, the right-leaning Bassets just seem to want to live up to conservative ideals, and not chatter on about it. Now, I know a thing or two about Bassets and let me tell you I have never met a Basset that thinks of anything except food, sleep, play, and tummy rubs. Amidst all the photos and videos of happy dogs running and playing there is a virtual minefield of political commentary. You can’t get away from it.
So that’s it! I’m done!
From Now on I am just going to look at the pictures.
You think Twitter is bad? Consider the President on twitter. He tweets out something, could be anything.
The other day he tweeted out about how important Sarah Sanders had been to his Administration. This is a rather innocuous post.
The first 45 replies were all negatives. Ridicule of Sanders. Ridicule of the President. The replies were of the “Orange Haired Man bad” style of condemning the President.
Apparently the next 1,500 replies were nice ones approving of the President. However we will never really know. Those replies had a dialogue box and inside the dialogue box it read “This post is no longer available.”
So the guy gets some 67K likes for his tweet, and he can only read 45 replies. Forty three of which were extremely critical.
I wonder if the President would be allowed more positive replies if he confined his remarks to bassett hounds?
So, you’re saying Twitter has gone to the dogs?
I have heard that Twitter and Facebook groups set up for even the most innocuous topics seem to have become political in the last couple of years. I remind myself of this every time I am tempted to sign up for either.
Glad you clarified that. Late last year we moved away from an area of New York state on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, near Rochester. To our southeast was Ontario County, and to our east was the Town of Ontario. But the Town of Ontario was not in Ontario County (it was in Wayne County). And we were only a couple of hours’ drive from the Canadian province of Ontario. Occasional confusion ensued when someone mentioned “Ontario” as to whether they were referring to the Canadian province, the New York county, or the New York town.
Don’t forget Ontario, Indiana. It’s about a day’s bicycle ride from my house.
I was on Facebook several years ago, since one of my nephews thought it would be a good place to plan the funeral and services for my Mother (their grandmother). After that, I started getting all sorts of irrelevant stuff and quit.
My wife, on the other hand, found several Deer-hound sites that included breeders of some of our girls. That was great for a while until everyone started retweeting political messages. She doesn’t check it any more, which is a shame. Like your Basset sites, it was a great way to follow some of the dogs we knew.
So far, the bunny rabbit feed hasn’t been tainted by politics yet.
Ontario, California, a populous US city in Southern California (One or more of the shipping companies seems to have a hub here as I see my packages go through there when I am tracking them.)
Ontario, Illinois
Ontarioville, Illinois
Ontario, Indiana
Ontario, Iowa
Ontario, New York, a town in Wayne County, New York.
Ontario (CDP), New York, a hamlet and census-designated place in Wayne County, New York.
Ontario County, New York
Ontario, Ohio
Ontario, Oregon
Ontario, Wisconsin
Did you want the ones in Canada and Belize, too?
Do you use some sort of alfalfa pellets?
Impressive.
I was hesitant to consider Mastadon a real option to help replace the evils of twitter/facebook; it leaves a lot of technical problems to be solved. But with https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk/d also existing, I have faith that an acceptable twitter replacement exists.
I left twitter when they sent me the email telling me I had been duped by the Russians into voting for Trump. My feed consisted largely of pro-life sites and Catholic priests. Yup. I was duped.
The Playboy strategy?
Or would that be the anti-Playboy strategy, that being just reading the articles …. ?
Yes. Do you have a bunny?
I was slow there. Oh well!
No. Our cat eats them. They’re her favorite. I was trying to have a funny, though.
I did have a bunny when I was a kid — there were two that we rescued from a grass fire, if I remember correctly. I think there is a photo of me bottle feeding one. Nope. It’s a photo of my mother bottle feeding them. I’m on the left and a sister is on the right. Spring 1958. I think we had been burning off some ground down by the creek to make a second garden, and saved these bunnies from the fire. I’d have to check Mom’s diaries as to how long we had them. Haven’t tried raising any since.)
I had never heard of Mastodon before, so I went looking. I’m not sure which technical problems you are referring to. One non-technical problem is that the Mastodon organization itself will not list your server unless it actively censors (moderates) unwokeness: “We only list servers that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia.”
That’s not necessarily a show-stopper for me, but that makes it harder to find out about servers that are committed to liberalism and free speech. I signed up for the one at devolutionnet.com, but I’m only the first person other than the creator to sign on, and it doesn’t even have its moderation policy or terms and conditions posted yet. I don’t know if it aspires to be listed at Mastodon.
I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up my own server, but first I want to learn more about how it all works. And I would moderate against racial bigotry on my server. (Racism is a more elusive issue.) I would not moderate against phobias.
Being fundamentally cheap and lazy, I would buy the hosting service from Mastodon for 7 euros/month. It isn’t even possible to host it on my existing hostgator service, so it would probably cost a lot more than that in both monthly charges and work to host it myself. Don’t want that, especially the work.
One commenter on Twitter said that there is a master server that you need to connect to in order to connect to to other servers. If that’s true, I’m not sure the system is all that distributed and free from central control, even for those who do set up their own servers. So I’ll be hoping to find out whether or not that is true.
There’s a high capacity airport there. It’s near San Bernadino, in what’s called “The Inland Empire” on the southeast side of the sprawling Southern California expanse of population. The airport was developed about 30 years ago with the intent to take some of the passenger traffic load from Los Angeles International (LAX). That didn’t work, but it has found success as a cargo airport.
I’m not sure about your points, because I’m new to promoting Mastadon. Better or worse, the leftist social media push is now, and Mastadon is the technology that’s available. Like email, though, there is no “central server.” You just need a mastadon provider, much like a traditional email provider. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/usage/decentralization/
The software I pointed out, “honk”, is a very lightweight version of mastadon for a single user (think: email provider for a single email address). You can set up multiple honk servers on a single piece of hardware for very very little resource usage, to get multiple users. I’ve considered operating a fleet of honk servers.
So the issue seems to be: Twitter politicizes everything.
Or maybe: Every social media platform politicizes everything.
The trend seems to be that, over time, everyone gravitates to platforms with their own interests/beliefs/politics.
How is any of this a good thing when you create a platform for everyone and every opinion and humanity self organizes itself into its own tribes?
And if you aren’t a member of my tribe? Watch out! We want you gone!
(sighs. Pets dog. Dog demands tummy rub. Spends rest of morning giving attention to dog. World becomes a slightly better place).
I’m in twitter jail for the following tweet
This was after Cuomo tweeted “Only in America” after a woman tweeted that she would stand between her children and a predator with her gun. The woman happened to be a rape survivor.
According to Twitter I “violated their community standards”
specifically
“Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.”
No where, no where in my tweet did I violate their standards.
I refuse to remove my tweet so my ban may be permanent.
So be it. They are lying fascists.
Disability. Cuomo can’t help being what he is. 😈
I hopped on Twitter today and immediately regretted it. AOC blew up Twitter today.
@larrythebasset disagrees with you.
@honey_basset is happy playing in the field.
See? Its so much easier seeing the twitter world through the eyes of conservative basset hounds.
I was only on twitter for about a year. I used Instapundit’s twitter account as a way to follow stuff. Once Instapundit left twitter, I essentially left twitter too. (John Podhoretz was another person I read occasionally, but I think it’s good for his mental sanity not to be on there.)
The interviews about Instapundit’s (Glenn Reynolds’) new book about social media points to some really bad stuff especially about twitter, although I think most of us kind of knew a lot of this anyway.
Twitter might be good for a few things like real-time events, but it might be best to ignore it mostly. I checked into twitter a few times to try to figure out what is happening with Brexit. Perhaps it is still a decent source for foreign news and obscure topics.
The concept of Jonah Goldberg is not agreement, it is informed and educated discussion, with respect. He can be incredibly erudite, but also very plain or common, and off-color.
You won’t come away from him thinking “simple minded”. But, as shown by his dog followings, he likes to have fun.
His Remnant podcast on bears is hilarious.
Episode 108: Bears!
Twitter is handy for following fire updates in your area, weather, and current traffic conditions. I followed the major fires on it last summer and it was great.