[japanoise]

My impression of twitter was of an insular bizzaro-world where communities that are essentially invisible in meatspace become enormous and have outsized influence; k-pop fans are huge on twitter and almost always trending, but are barely known outside of their own circles elsewhere, not to mention all the incredibly granular political groups (the long and bloody trad-cath-leninist vs pinetree-eco-fash wars are so drawn out you'd be forgiven for not realising it's only 20 people per side, posting 24/7)

It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.

[ageitgey]

If someone I follow re-tweets an annoying hot take by someone I don't care about, I'll just block the random person they retweeted and move on with my life.

But what's really surprising to me is how often I see those few randomly blocked annoying people show up again in totally unrelated twitter threads with "This tweet is by someone you blocked". It really seems like the same few people just roam around the twitter universe spreading outrage and contention everywhere they go. It's like a playground for society's most unbearable people.

[npunt]

I have very similar experiences on twitter with blocked people, and have observed the effect in other communities. There are few really toxic people online, but they have a huge negative impact on discourse. This is why I think deplatforming and other moderation activities are useful and not just drops in the ocean.

[Kye]

I ran a block chain script on a couple of obnoxious celebrities with big followings. All the most drawn out and angry discussions under tweets now involve 1-2 people arguing with a bunch of blocked accounts. And they have no idea they're arguing with a group identity instead of people who invest in cultivating a personality.

[TLightful]

Maybe that says more about -your- bubble and usage than about twitter.

I've rarely had that experience. Maybe once in 5 years.

It actually suggests you hate your bubble, lol.

[friendlybus]

What do you use twitter for? I remember seeing Jack on the colbert report in the 2000s talking about being profitable as company. In those 20yrs I've never felt the need to tweet or read tweets. What's the appeal?

[TLightful]

I imagine it's horses for courses.

I detest / deleted Facebook with an ungodly passion ... but I can see how some people find some use for it.

I like twitter, apart from the political loons ... but, of course, everything is a function of what you put in and who you follow.

To answer your question: timeliness, access to "top" thinkers, a bubble created and curated without baby pictures.

[DharmaPolice]

>It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.

Well a lot of it is because it makes content production so damn easy. Take a real example which reached the BBC front page a while back [1].

The entire story is :

1. A Korean actress was cast for some role in something Harry Potter related.

2. Some people on Twitter were unhappy about this

3. JK Rowling defended the casting (also on Twitter).

4. Then there's some mention of some other story about Dumbledore not being shown as gay.

5. A couple of still photos + a clip from a movie

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45666350

OK, this is entertainment "news" so it's a pretty low bar but the reason this stuck in my mind was what a non-story this all was - even by the standards of the subject matter. There's not even an attempt to gauge whether these complaints represented a decent chunk (or the majority) of the Harry Potter fanbase - it's just a quote from a couple of random people annoyed about it. Imagine if national broadcasters could get away with quoting random people they overheard in the pub and this would constitute a story.

Of course, the thing giving the story some legitimacy is that Rowling has responded to this alleged controversy. And that's the other main reason (which is kind of reinforcing) - enough companies/famous people use Twitter as their method of communicating with the public (and by extension the press) that the press continue to use it.

[secondcoming]

The BBC is a shadow of its former self unfortunately

[andybak]

> trad-cath-leninist vs pinetree-eco-fash

I'm intrigued and baffled by this. Would you so kind as to expand it into something I can at least google?

I mean - I think I can guess the meaning but I might be wildly wrong so I'm not going to try without some further elucidation from yourself.

[monoideism]

The term "trad-cath-leninist" probably refers to folks like this (unless there's a hardcore Leninist faction of trad-caths socialists that I am unaware of):

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jappersandjanglers/2016/09/an-...

And "pinetree-eco-fash" refers to ecofascism, which is not uncommon among fascist groups:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism

I was unaware they were feuding on Twitter (since I follow no one in either of those groups), but it doesn't surprise me.

[Ericson2314]

I think the exact conjunction is a bit tongue-in-cheek. While there are certainly leftist infighting on Twitter, I don't think Catholicism or pine trees has much to do with it. The joke is that ideological names can be like genre names---ridiculously fine-grained but also absurdly concatenated.

[monoideism]

Yeah, I get it was tongue-in-cheek (eg, "pinetree"). I was just explaining who they were referring to in their tongue-in-cheek manner. And there definitely are traditional Catholic leftists, and there definitely are ecofascists.

And ecofascists are not left-wing.

[newen]

There's actually a decent amount of fighting between leftists and trad caths in twitter, if spend too much time there I guess. I'm off twitter now, thankfully.

And I wouldn't be surprised to find trad cath socialists there either.

[Avshalom]

trad-cath and ecofascists imply right-wing infighting

[Nasrudith]

I personally parsed the "trad-cath-leninist" as the most doomed communist-fascist" type of an overly insular specific subgroup of uneducated workers who inevitably are immediately purged if either fascists or communists take over whether they assist in a coup or not. There is no good outcome for the fools unless you count "dying in obscurity because the nation was too stable for them to do anything".

Pine tree I could see as Lebanese nationalist and/or Pacific Northwest ecofascists who are similiar groups. The two would get on like a dumpster fire as the trad-caths wouldn't prioritize the environment and would be bigoted towards them. The eco fascists would find them abominable and feel no affinity since they aren't contributing to their central justifying ideal - even though anybody with sense knows the object of fascism is fascism and the eco would inevitably wind up lipservice at best. While tongue in cheek they are perfect useless idiots who would just get a bunch of innocent people killed if they got remotely close to what they wanted.

[Avshalom]

Pine tree eco-fascists are specifically white supremacist/asatru eco-fascists

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=canonical&q=eco+fascism&iax=images...

The norse rune mask cut out over a pine forest being the referent.

[japanoise]

Pinetrees are eco fascists (mostly admirers of the unabomber) who use the pinetree emoji in their names.

Trad-cath-leninist is more straightforward: traditional (I.e. Reactionary/fundamentalist) Catholic (as in the church) + marxist-leninist.

[watwut]

> k-pop fans are huge on twitter and almost always trending

Maybe the real question is why k-pop is completely invisible everywhere else. Why the places with gatekeepers tend to ignore k-pop audience.

[frockington1]

Money. K-pop doesn't have the same mass audience as other genres of music. Also, people who are into k-pop are generally really into k-pop (at least in the States). Its an audience that stays informed by themselves

[CapricornNoble]

>>> K-pop doesn't have the same mass audience as other genres of music.

As a VERY casual consumer of either genre, I find that baffling. My personal assessment is that K-pop is heavier on "sexy" style[1][2][3] vs J-pop's "cute" style[4][5]. Sex sells, and IMO K-pop girl groups sell it better than J-pop. So it's strange that they don't attract the same sort of universal fanbase as other international female entertainers.[6][7]

[1]https://youtu.be/pOmTdFpIDX8 [2]https://youtu.be/HfySji7kNi0 [3]https://youtu.be/n3IwCiSgl-Q <--a "top 10" list

[4]https://youtu.be/1WTy2yqKI4w [5]https://youtu.be/sAerCLnlShg [6]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU [7]https://youtu.be/LDZX4ooRsWs

[tentboy]

I am more a fan of jpop but also enjoy kpop, and I have looked into this.

Japan is the second largest music market in the world. They don't need to export their music to sustain itself and through a combination of region locked music and less focus on worldwide appeal it hasn't had the same global reach as south korea's music industry, which is smaller and relies on worldwide consumption