[addicted]

Most people probably don’t interact with the comments. Most probably just watch the videos, ignore the comments, or glance at the comments and never venture back due to the toxicity of it all.

Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content. Instagram/Snapchat is the same, except now the comments are pictures with a whole lot of body shaming thrown in.

[DanielleMolloy]

> Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content.

Much of it, yes. But 1) tailor your Twitter stream to your (professional) interests, 2) ignore any trending news, 3) unfollow people who tweet random stuff or have too much Trump (or any current politics) in their mix and it will provide useful. I follow mostly computational neuroscience / machine learning scientists, and have heard much about recent research, summary articles or conferences first on Twitter. On an evening just two weeks ago I glanced at my list and saw a poster about one of the most intriguing research findings I've yet seen. Without Twitter I would have had to attend the conference or waited for the paper. Science Twitter is active and growing, and as scientists are busy people for many it has become a popular and low-effort announcement platform for new work (much better than university blogs or press releases and such).

I see much more toxicity glancing on any video's YouTube comments than on my Twitter stream.

[Asdfbla]

I find it pretty hard to curate even interesting lists of researchers on Twitter without running into too much fluff or political tweets. I don't blame them for using the medium as it might be intended and of course they are free to share their personal opinions, but in my experience even just a handful of people who tweet a bit too often can pollute your stream enough to make it annoying to follow along.

Maybe Twitter should just let you filter posts based on content. (Maybe it's already possible, I'm not a big Twitter user.)

[psyc]

Same here. I only follow graphics programmers and game developers. The graphics people are ok, but a few of them tweet a lot of politics in addition to content I wouldn’t want to miss. And game development is thoroughly saturated in The Culture War, so there’s no practical way to avoid that except to ignore it.

[woolvalley]

There is word filter feature, but the UX is a bit clunky and you cant subscribe / paste a big list of words you would like to filter.

A future feature I would like to see in social networks is automatically generating tags for posts and letting people filter out the posts based on that.

With that, I can just choose an automatically generated US politics filter for example and not have to maintain a mute list.

[steve_musk]

Well what was the “most intriguing research finding” you saw? Don’t leave us hanging haha

[warent]

> "Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content"

This is by far the best, most succinct description of Twitter I've ever heard. Love it. Keeping this one and requoting it forever, thank you

[Apocryphon]

The evanescent nature of Snapchat is probably what's making it less harmful than the others. Though disappearing content probably just introduces different issues.