[jrmg]

I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network.

I have the completely un-researched and un-backed opinion that Twitter changing its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" in 2009 has had an unappreciated, oversized negative affect on the world.

[cxr]

I hold an opinion that can be considered somewhat opposite[1].

Similarly, a commenter from Reddit[2] writes:

> I haven’t personally met anyone active on Twitter for years. There are very specific types of people that want to be sharing things in that way and from my experience they are very narcissistic.

> Not that Reddit doesn’t have their share of asssholes, but I find that because it is anonymous it is also more tolerable. At least it was the case until a few years ago, now Reddit became very popular and the quality of the posts has declined immensely in almost all subs.

> Twitter is just a bunch of people self promoting themselves as more intelligent, more informed, more socially and environmentally conscious, etc. Basically IG for unattractive people.

Already implicit in the "What are you doing?" prompt is the hallmark of modern social media that focuses on positioning individual personality and punditry over common, for-the-greater-good, "kitchen table" discussion in service to a given topic—the focus is on you, the contributor, rather that taking backseat to whatever it is that you're supposed to be contributing to. I'm not sure that this can be rolled back at this point, though.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180315>

2. <https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/z59ccj/annaka_on...>

[rchaud]

That change in language was likely prompted by a boost in news media relevance for Twitter after the Iran protests against then-leader Ahmedinejad in summer 2009.

Prior to that, I had not heard of Twitter. I was on Facebook and Digg and that was about it.