Twitter's Trending Topics, designed to surface significant news, invariably leads to context collapse, where disparate audiences are lecturing past each other
“Context collapse” is a great term for explaining a lot of Twitter interactions that are fractured, incompletely informed, yet smothered by inexplicably strong feelings about something undefined and usually undefinable. https://warzel.substack.com/ ...
This is a great analysis of how twitter actually WORKS Socially, technologically. As an explainer, it benefits from dissecting a fairly benign example of the Main Character phenomenon, expanding into how twitter's business and engagement incentives thrive on context collapse. htt…
“This isn't a dramatic story about unrelenting harassment that ruined a life. But it's noteworthy precisely because it's so familiar: a perfect example of our broken social media dynamics, which feel ever-increasingly designed to dehumanize us...” https://warzel.substack.com/ ...
Getting rid of trending topics would absolutely be a great way to start fixing Twitter's myriad problems. (That said, horror movies can absolutely be set in space.) https://warzel.substack.com/ ...
One way I've been thinking about this is “cancel culture” is a less useful term than “cancel behavior.” There is a certain set of behaviors which, when combined the the problems of this (and other) platforms, lead to cancellation, harassment, and too many very bad days.
But those dunks algorithmically lead to more dunks, and then to the trending box, and then to more attention, and all of a sudden a company decides it has a PR problem on its hands, or actual neo-Nazis get involved, or someone takes this one bad tweet too seriously and...
The key thing is the behaviors don't feel, to the people engaging in them, like a big deal. You're just dunking on someone! Or criticizing them! Or making fun of them! You're just doing some tweets. Joining in on the game. You don't want anyone fired or harassed or swatted.
YES OMG “context collapse, which generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith” https://warzel.substack.co…
“It certainly feels like the company still doesn't realize that one of the worst possible experiences on Twitter is actually to win the game and go viral.” oh my good god yes https://twitter.com/...
“You're repurposed as fodder for content generation in a way that's just so dehumanizing. I don't really believe in cancel culture, I think it's a platform failure.” https://warzel.substack.com/ ...
A perfect example of our broken social media dynamics, which feel ever-increasingly designed to dehumanize us, polarize us, and make us all miserable. https://ow.ly/...
Being a verified user named Karen means knowing with complete confidence that any wrong move, offline or online, will destroy my life and it makes me feel ALIVE https://twitter.com/...
I'm still not wild about the way “cancel culture” gets applied to a wide range of cases that have nothing to do with each other, but the aspect we can all agree sucks (total randos getting mobbed online) seems mostly to be the result of specific decisions by Twitter. https://twit…
My 1st Galaxy Brain post is about what it's like to be Twitter's main character and why we need to kill trending topics. I talked to @elle_hunt who accidentally tweeted a spicy opinion about horror movies in space and ended up in the eye of the storm. https://t.co/zxdixC0NAp