Interesting new experience: That “Bye, Twitter” blog post started getting discussion on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com), happens to me a few times per year - what with that and every masto instance picking it up, things were running pretty hot. Discussion was a little nastier than usual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33759340
Then somebody “flagged” the post and *poof* it vanished.
Is this… a little surprising? My heart isn’t broken or anything.
@timbray Not surprising at all. The flagging system is intended to keep low-value discussion off the front page, and the median value of the comments on that article was pretty poor. So I think the system is pretty much WAI.
Now *why* posts about Twitter (and EM) attract such divisive, non intellectually curious discussion is another matter that I'm sure digital sociologists will be trying to figure out for some time.
@raph @timbray The structure of Twitter pervasively encourages trolling: don't have enough space to write anything interesting, just to provoke a strong emotional reaction, and your metric of success is how many people you provoked a detectable reaction from. The UI is full of numbers measuring your trollishness. Maybe is unsurprising that discussions about Twitter have more heat than light.
@raph @timbray Just to clarify, none of the "you"s above refer to any of the people in the discussion; should've said "one".