Twitter C/D

lol

Isn’t everyone talking abt bean dad bc he said some super weird and possibly made up shit, and then a few outliers go psycho on him & those ppl are signal boosted and come to represent a ginned up idea that twitter is an overreaction machine ? Idk this seemed like a pretty deserving clusterfuck to me lol the guy’s story was bonkers

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Monday, January 4, 2021 2:19 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah people try to make these things so serious when its 99% idle rubbernecking

i prefer bean dad discourse to tall/short woman discourse

genuine lol that that Broderick (no idea who he is btw) piece is on Substack. Medium must be really mad about this

I miss the blog era too but there's no going back

ryan broderick yeah i know that guy, cool guy

i prefer bean dad discourse to tall/short woman discourse

Beanín nach bfhuil

yeah people try to make these things so serious when its 99% idle rubbernecking

― lag∞n, Monday, January 4, 2021 1:27 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

People on Twitter have always had fun getting "mad" about trivial shit. But over time, I think the general mood on the site has turned sour and more anxious, so even trivial shit feels higher-stakes somehow.

I think the phrase “rooted in pedophilia” was used.

But over time, I think the general mood on the site has turned sour and more anxious, so even trivial shit feels higher-stakes somehow.

― jaymc, Monday, 4 January 2021 19:42 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hardly just "on the site" now was it

So yeah, like most of these things it’s something I saw on tumblr a decade ago, lol these fucking people.

yeah users moving from tumblr to twitter is an underrated aspect of some of the more truly insane developments in the discourse

I’d seen bean dad retweeted before and he struck me as innocuous gen x npr indie rock dad

kind of wonder how much of people being cranky was that they dislike that archetype

Broderick’s warlord analogy about Twitter is a great one. Absolute utter abdication of responsibility by Twitter dot com management leads to a power structure very similar to the one you see with real-life warlords, with attention as the controlled resource.

all of the were so anti racist that we reinvented segregation stuff is pure tumblr lol

yeah users moving from tumblr to twitter is an underrated aspect of some of the more truly insane developments in the discourse

What furries hath we unleashed

the tumblr teens (now probably 20 year olds) are really aggro when someone questions one of their five hundred personal identifiers

I identify as pandemisexual
I do not leave the house during a pandemic

from that substack article: "The site’s trending algorithms are so thoughtless and robotic that literally anything that achieves a certain level of engagement is beamed into global feeds."

interestingly or prob not is that twitter clearly has been doing a ton of moderation of their trending topics i noticed a couple weeks before the election they basically shut them down altogether the top trends would barely change for days and itd be like fans are wishing justin beiber happy anniversary just obvs nothing organic bubbling up, then the day after the election there was all this right wing conspiracy stuff on there about the election being stolen but that only lasted for a couple days at which point it didnt go quite back to the pre election stasis but none of the really nasty wackjob stuff was showing up, and then the usual wingnuts started complaining about being censored because none of their stuff was trending, they were clearly running campaigns with the goal of getting trending, which is interesting from the pov of all the hysteria about bots getting a topic trending is prob the only thing bots are really good for since what real people follow bots, anyway since then the trends are looking pretty curated, a lot of them have written descriptions which is a clear sign someone took a look at them, i think you could organically trend on some local level but once youre getting to the big list someone is deciding what stays and nuking the really dicey ones

thats just about the trends list fwiw i use the old school "latest tweets" feed rather than the algo "home" feed which is mostly from what i can tell based on what people you follow are interacting with, dont really have a sense what sort of moderation is going on in there but i wouldnt be surprised if there was some tied into topics too

Nothing innocuous about gen Xers

Nor innoculated, alas

ayye

Broderick’s warlord analogy about Twitter is a great one. Absolute utter abdication of responsibility by Twitter dot com management leads to a power structure very similar to the one you see with real-life warlords, with attention as the controlled resource.

― stet

Brilliant pattern recognition and analogy drawing there, broderick and stet. Good work!

the thing about all these huge platforms is theyre impossible to moderate profitably you would need to pay millions of highly trained people around the clock so they just pay thousands of poorly trained ones say fuck it and get rich

Tumblr porn ban truly underrated butterfly effect here

― scampish inquisition (gyac), Monday, January 4, 2021 7:50 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

*ahem* just fyi the ban isn't being as strictly enforced anymore

do i have a tumblr beefcake blog i "curate" on my other laptop while i wfh? truly, who can say

I was going to say, the “porn” ban happened two owners ago. Who even knows what’s going on with moderation

one more quote from that article that resonated:

Bean Dad is very simple. It means one thing — your website is poorly run. That’s it.

It means that context collapse has gotten so bad and the scale of your trending algorithms are so completely out of whack that a total moron tweeting about beans can create the same level of discussion within your community as the Trump Georgia call. It means that your users are so desperate for your made up internet points that they would consider turning an extremely mundane story about using a can opener into a TWENTY-THREE tweet thread and are also so vicious and insane and bored that they would turn that thread about beans into a national scandal.

I mean... maybe people are so fucking tired of harbingers of societal collapse over which they have zero agency (Trump Georgia call) that they jump on goofy freakshows for kicks?

If all the bean dad energy had been converted to hectoring Trump with "have you no decency, sir" we'd finally have him!

i think at least part of his point is that twitter has almost no control over its user base and whatever the original purpose of twitter was (brief information updates?), it's now degenerated into "here for the trainwreck"

People have always loved irrelevant bullshit, I really don’t understand the hand wringing abt this story ...

otm

Whatever the assholes who founded Twitter intended, it was always going to be an outlet for millions of people to goof off and vent. The idea that it's supposed to be serious is much worse than it being a constant stream of irrelevant bullshit and dick jokes.

Facebook wasn't undermining democracy when boomers were playing Farmville 17 hours a day and insulting each others' recipes.

until apps took off on phones it really wasn’t obvious that it’d ever get very big!

like the first year or so of twitter was just small groups of friends tweeting at each other, and at the very beginning it was via sms. you could turn notifications on/off on a per-person basis so you’d get a text when your friend “tweeted”

oh, also the main page was literally all tweets on the service

Before I knew what bean dad was I saw a tweet that was riffing on it like “if my dad made me spend hours opening can of beans when I was a kid...” that in the abstract seemed creative and funny but then seeing other people reference it and finding out that it’s actual thing was way less enjoyable. It’s almost like a novelistic parody of an annoying Twitter topic at this point.

Tweeting about the Trump call doesn’t necessarily have to be “have you no decency Sir” in the replies as much as just publicly acknowledging “hey this is uniquely fucked up” though arguably that’s just as futile tbf

that substack essay was good

it’s obvious why this sort of shit is good for twitter, it’s basically like the way espn used to use first take, have some moron blowhard like stephen a smith or skip bayless make a headline, get the athlete’s response, turn the whole thing into a news story. it’s printing money and people are too stupid to realize it’s rotting their brains

they’re giving stephen a smith his own show, right?

the system works

People have always loved irrelevant bullshit, I really don’t understand the hand wringing abt this story ...

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Monday, January 4, 2021 3:41 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

bean dad was good i enjoyed the bean dad experience, the thing that twitter does thats bad is like letting nazis organize, not goofing on some podcaster

and its not even rotting my brain in fact my brain is becoming larger with every post... like a galaxy

and obvs the difference between bean dad and stephen a smith is bean dad is an authentic clown where stephen a is a (brilliant) schtick, twitter gives us the real stuff

—It means that your users are so desperate for your made up internet points that they would consider turning an extremely mundane story about using a can opener into a TWENTY-THREE tweet thread and are also so vicious and insane and bored that they would turn that thread about beans into a national scandal.—

the article is funny cause its infected with the energy it claims to be critiquing, and obvs the bean dad story if true, which its not, is totally freaking psycho and not mundane

i love twitter and have learned an absolute ton following tons of smart and interesting people. also i have no idea wtf “bean dad” is. you lot are insane.

you dont know bean dad and yet already love him, strange

The pulse that my tweet skipped indeed