[hn_throwaway_99]

From the article:

> “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one person tweeted in September.

Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory.

I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all these tweets to back it up!

[magashna]

It's the equivalent of local news on the spot interviews. They always look for the dopiest idiots because it makes for great TV. For some reason online they've gone the other way and try and use them as a legitimate source. The habit of using @fuckstick as a source needs to die off.

[dbatten]

I showed up at the scene of a (small) plane crash yesterday hoping to go for a hike. Wasn't sure what the fuss was about, so pulled my phone out to check local news. Within seconds, a reporter for a local news channel was tapping on my window. I rolled it down, he told me there was a plane crash, and asked if I'd like to share my thoughts on camera.

Um, no? How could I _possibly_ have anything intelligent to say about this?

And then it hit me... this is why local news is so crazy. Because the people who end up interviewed on TV are the types of people who _don't_ realize they have nothing intelligent to say, or who are self-absorbed enough to want to get on TV however they can.

Needless to say, I didn't do the interview.

[SiVal]

I'm always astonished (slow learner or beginner's mind, you decide) at the Q&A Amazon section Amazon offers for its products when I see how many "I don't know" answers there are. Someone posts a question, "Does it list an artificial sweetener as one of its ingredients?", and several people will always answer, "I'm sorry, I don't know," "I have no idea, I don't own this product" etc. What?! Do all of these people somehow imagine that every posted request for info is being personally directed at them? Are these the people I'm standing in line with at the DMV? Do they all think I'm the crazy one? (Am I?)

Juxtapose this with the local news interviews and it all makes a strange sort of sense....

[magashna]

Yes, because Amazon emails those questions to you directly if you've bought the product before. Sometimes the questions are very specific, thus "I don't know"

[elliekelly]

To be fair the crazy Amazon responses are at least partially due to Amazon[1] but I do think it's still kind of nuts to respond. I always picture my Grandma as the person answering because she seems to think every email has been sent with as much thought and care as a hand written letter.

Interesting r/mildlyinfuriating thread[2] about it.

[1] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/66739/amazon-que...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/4200oz/w...

[busterarm]

Or people who want their 15 minutes.

"They climbin' in yo windows" "Whistle tips go woo woo" "Ain't nobody got time for that" "they had us the first half, I'm not gonna lie" Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker etc

[monktastic1]

Are you sure all those people wanted their 15 minutes? I think at least some of them were genuinely responding to reporters, and it was society that turned their behaviors into phenomena.

[busterarm]

Maybe, I"m just trying to come up with some read that's more charitable than "they're all too stupid to know they don't have anything intelligent to say"...which is basically what OP was saying.

[pacala]

Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian: they can craft any narrative by choosing which tweets to show in your timeline. The ultimate out-of-context quoting machine. 140 character limits was set in place for a reason.

[lukebitts]

The reason being SMS character limits... right?

[aeternum]

Quotes have been cherry-picked and taken out of context since language was invented.

The only difference with Twitter and Facebook is that they can now do it automatically and at impressive scale.

[dominotw]

> Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian

not sure if gp's point has anything to do with twitter itself or character limits.

[pacala]

gp is complaining about third parties quoting tweets out of context. When Twitter's raison d'être is out of context quoting. He saw trees, I'm glad to point at the whole forest.

[V-eHGsd_]

gp wasn't talking about tweets being taken out of context. they were talking about reporters using an entire tweet from a random person to support a random theory.

[pacala]

Tweets are mass produced quotable out of context discourse. To be harvested to support arbitrary theories.

[V-eHGsd_]

it seems like your beef is with twitter generally, but gp (at least by my reading) was more complaining about the journalists that rely on it in this particular way, not the underlying platform.

I agree that twitter is a cesspool and does not encourage thoughtful communication, but it feels a little forced to me in this conversation.

[segmondy]

It's 280 btw.

[prepend]

It’s not new. I had a few journalist friends in the 90s they would call or email every once in a while saying “I’m looking for a quote for xyz” and then get one and print or reference it on air.

All these random joe quotes are stupid and I wish editors would stop it.

[WhompingWindows]

Slightly unrelated, but why do people like Colbert indulge Trump's twitter so often as if it's big news whenever he needs to take a deuce and thumbs out some text? I love Colbert but damn, do we really need to hear Trump's tweets read out-loud every day by multiple talking heads and talk-show hosts? That just feeds the beast.

[bluGill]

At least Trump is president, so his words mean more than random idiots. How much more they mean isn't clear, but his position means knowing what he thinks is sometimes important regardless of your opinion on the topic.

You can argue that Trump's tweets got more attention than they were worth before he was president.

[maerF0x0]

Journalists have been doing this in other forms for a long time. See TV news taking random interviews with whomever in the parking lot during an event.

[duxup]

I saw an article about a sports related 'controversy'. They linked to 5 tweets. Each user had maybe two dozen tweets at most.