[bb123]

I’d be pretty careful drawing any conclusions about the mood of the nation from Twitter. The Twitter crowd are very loud and quite extremist but I believe they are small in number. To be honest I’d just avoid Twitter all together. Nothing good comes out of it.

[kodah]

Debating how small or big they are is fruitless when their power and impact via their network effect is palpable. "Avoiding Twitter" and it's collection of extremists (and their followers that signal boost) is not possible. These people have their tweets and reactions in the news, they are constantly quoted on blogs and websites.

I'd argue the opposite that you are. Twitter extremists influence the rest of the nation and it's easy to see how the network effect has some decay on their ideas, but the thorny points remain.

At some point you have to stop treating Twitter and Twitter users like an isolation zone.

[Gene_Parmesan]

If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it. None of the actual people I know and talk to in real life harbor any sort of extremist views one way or another. Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.)

IMO their statements are amplified by things like national media because of their extremism; the extremism generates strong feelings (whether positive or negative), and strong feelings leads to more eyes on the media for longer. That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist beliefs.

[kodah]

> If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it.

I don't have Twitter.

> Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.)

Network effects do not cause or force you to acknowledge a source. They merely require you to trust the mental gymnastics of the person who communicated the idea to you.

> That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist belief

Generally the people adopting will adopt bits an pieces, this is what I described as "decay".

The rest I agree with.

[jbjohns]

I wish companies and politicians would follow your recommendation.

[kbelder]

You could post this in nearly every hackernews thread and I'd upvote you each time for being the most relevant comment on the page.