Twitter C/D

it's kind of ironic that the political media people who privilege writing or opinions by someone who upholds all of their rules about form and politeness over the actual content of the writing are expressing how "rude" people who don't follow the rules but have relevant points are.. on twitter

twitter's used in the most abusive, inflammatory ways by people making the same points they are in flowery longform!

you can only be rude at bret stephens by writing another opinion column written in standard op-ed form

i don't really get the 'hellsite' thing. it's addictive and encourages some bad mental habits (inattention, snap judgment, groupthink) but like, that's because it's funny and enjoyable

i have like 100 words muted so far, some of them extremely common, in my quest for a feed of funny jokes and video game jokes and not political squabbles

I think I've previously underrated how large the number of people is who are constantly hovering, waiting for someone with a large following to make a post that they can reply to with some crafted attempt at humor/retweetability to help them climb the ranks

there are so many people doing this, and not necessarily consciously. the first-reply guy tweeting style is somehow naive and yet stiltedly ironic, as if this is the most important tweet they've made all day

as with elsewhere online dont read the comments

incredibly otm

wonder how many followers u have to have before youre consistently getting reaction gifs in yr replies

yeah wtf

made the mistake of looking at the replies last week and it depends on the kind of person that's being replied to, but any viral younger person has something like a 50% reaction gif ratio in their replies, and any public figure with a huge following gets tons of them

they need to remove gifs

happy for you flopson but there is so little i find funny or enjoyable on it.

i ended up putting it back on my phone temporarily, i'm at a conference and ime it is the main way conference attendees communicate. when it's done though i'll remove it

it's good for linking to larger pieces i guess but 280 characters is really not enough to produce thinking w/ any nuance or complication involved

that's why they had to invent "tweetstorms"

the rush of getting a bunch of likes or retweets is intense, kind of terrifying though too and these days i don't really want the attention there

also all social media apps are better and less addictive when you turn off notifications

i deactivated FB and holy shit i have not looked back at all, i don't miss a thing from that place

i don't really get the 'hellsite' thing. it's addictive and encourages some bad mental habits (inattention, snap judgment, groupthink) but like, that's because it's funny and enjoyable

― flopson, Monday, March 4, 2019 11:00 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am so glad to not be au fait with the latest controversies, cancellations, what jonathan chait thinks about anything etc. that end up being such a part of twitter

your choice to follow that though

what jonathan chait thinks about anything etc.

don't you voluntarily submit yourself to listening to chapo?

unless you follow only specific pockets, there are some topics that are nearly impossible to avoid unless you mute a shitload of words!

always so proud of my feed when someone complains of some terrible thing being inescapable in theirs and i never see it

i don't really get the 'hellsite' thing

i tell everyone this but one day you will

what jonathan chait thinks about anything etc.

don't you voluntarily submit yourself to listening to chapo?

― flopson, Monday, March 4, 2019 1:33 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah, i did for a bit, but only hear it on occasion now if my gf has it on at home

your choice to follow that though

― flopson, Monday, March 4, 2019 1:33 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is, ime, sort of not true. like you can follow a comedian and they will start a tweet storm about the latest trump thing. you can follow an actor and they'll post the latest article that people are mad at. you follow an academic and they call out someone for whatever

follow some weird twitter account that's just funny.

then they post about the latest controversy in the DSA

lol true

every attempt i made to clean up my feed proved futile short of unfollowing everyone, though maybe i should've given "turn off everyone's retweets" a shot

yeah that probably would've been good

didn't realize that was an option

i also tried the pruning thing before just giving up

the only thing i miss is that i used it as an aggregator for news (especially wrt sports) and now I'm a little unmoored

i mean before i left twitter entirely you had to manually turn of retweets on each person's profile, it would've taken a long, concerted effort that i wasn't up to. idk if they've improved that at all

ah

nope still a thing

follow some weird twitter account that's just funny.

then they post about the latest controversy in the DSA

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Monday, March 4, 2019 6:07 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true. u can get it pretty low though

like the last couple days the online leftists i follow were all tweeting grievances like ‘can’t believe we’re doing race v class again’ but i didn’t actually see any tweets of ppl doing race v class again. that’s pretty good

i generally just stoically let ppl do their thing with dead celebrities but i really dont think i deserve to be subjected to super earnest testimonials about how dylan mckay taught ppl what cool was all about

the childrens soap opera was not actually good or cool u didnt even think so when u were a child my god

otm

i personally drew the line at an image of "dylan mckay" paired with the words "if your girl was a teenager in the 90s, check on her"
horrifying

o god

uhh

feel like people project a lot of emotional depth on to celebrity deaths as it's both depersonalized because your relationship to the deceased is very shallow, and also because it's a public way to share mourning with others in this ephemeral way. when your grandfather or whoever dies you can tweet about it but it's a much different type of story and relating to death in a personal way is not a good twitter fit

unless it's retweets of those moments where people take a selfie with their dead relative and it's super weird. those are totally made for twitter

whoa wtf @ LL's comment

i respect the dead relative selfie posters completely

someone post that tweet about when a celebrity dies Twitter is like everyone trying to flush a single turd down a toilet

where people take a selfie with their dead relative and it's super weird.

Technically not selfies, but

https://i.imgur.com/zC0LG8q.gif

i used to watch 90210 to make sense of daniel drennan’s wrapuos, which were pretty influential

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.tv.bh90210/FNixqSySvBY/rhSIo7C373UJ

an excerpt:
So then Brandon "V05" Walsh and this guy Mark are at the so-called
University television station, and this guy Mark is timing Brandon's
piece which is some nonsense about the fact that the school year has
started again; just like when the school newspaper last year ran the
weird headline, "School Starts", this year we have Brandon telling
everyone ALREADY AT school via the SCHOOL television station that SCHOOL HAS STARTED like how DUMB are the kids at CU anyway? And so Brandon is saying inane things like, "back by popular demand, it's the school year" which is a really weird thing to say, like I don't think you can say "the school year is back" and how weird that English doesn't have any word that means "the time after Labor Day" unlike French which has the word “la rentree" to denote the sense of
general-going-back-to-school-has-started-after-vacation time of year. So then Brandon is talking about "higher" education while we get shots of beer kegs and then Brandon finishes up his car sales pitch and this guy Mark who has been timing him is all, "perfect" and Brandon is worried about finding someone "who can read it on the air" and Mark is all listing the qualities that define every scary brainless talking head on
television news, and Brandon is all liking newspapers because "no one has to read them to you" and this guy Mark is all, "that's because no one is reading them anymore" which is such an annoying thing to say, like they should take this guy Mark's wooden head and recycle it for newsprint. So then this guy Mark is all explaining how they are going to have "75,000 people watching" and isn't it great to know that if you are a communications major at CU that you are taught that more important than editorial integrity or anything else is RATINGS like how obviously is
this a Fox television show which blurs the line between editorial content and advertising all the time in order to pump up ratings, and which editorializes on the news like tonight on the so-called Fox News with that chowderhead Rosanna Scotto whose lead story was about some poor schmuck's public access cable show which "portrayed Satanism" and “attacked Christians" but before we get to that story, "he was considered by some to be a devil, but was also a saint of the rap world--Tupac Shakur is dead tonight" LIKE WHAT KIND OF NONSENSE IS THAT and then they go right into a call to "clean up cable" of so-called Satanic public access shows, like this one show represents one-hundredth of one percent of what is spewed out by the 100% non-liberal corporate-owned television and we need to "clean it up" meanwhile _Married With Children_ is now in distribution worldwide and the Fox News channel is coming because Rupert Murdoch paid a per-subscriber fee to all the cable companies in the country knocking other channels like Lifetime off the air. So then just to prove my point this guy Mark is all, "if you want to reach the boobs you gotta be on the tube" and Brandon is all, "nice to know you aren't going to talk down to our audience" like that has to be the most telling meta-exchange of this show's history and this guy Mark is all, "that's what anchors are for" and then Brandon is all picking up a pile of audition tapes to look through and this guy Mark is all, "I don't think we should hire someone just for looks" and Brandon is all, "well not bad ones, anyway".

i miss the old internet and also the pre fox news world

shut it down

I just returned to this realization today.
Music is enjoyable don't get me wrong.
But your time is much better spent listening to a podcast.

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) March 8, 2019

oooh baby
i feel like
the podcast sounds better with you

from a certain pov that is self-evident - if audio is what you consume when video is impossible or awkward, in the "gaps", podcasts can feel self-improving, like you're making use of what would otherwise be "wasted" time. from that pov music is just indulgence. obviously i don't agree with this but anecdotally it's a pretty widespread, if not very examined, pov

yeah i personally hate it