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Why I've Quit Twitter (2016) (hintjens.com)
11 points by yakshaving_jgt on Dec 26, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



I've been a follower of Hintjen's writing since a few years. I appreciate his thoughts on distributed systems and software governance. He's still shining like a rare diamond on those topics and I think we'll take many more years to truly apply all his forward-thinking principles into practice.

I'm sad to have now discovered this article by him which hasn't arguably aged well. Or let's say that I would have wished that Peter never trespassed into involving himself into the world of social justice. He couldn't be an authority in there and so I judge this article to be rather useless or superfluous.

On the other hand, I get it: If you spend too much time on Twitter it really can alter your perception such that you start to think in the patterns laid out in the article. Twitter is a parallel society. It's hella interesting but also not real.

But what happens on it isn't what happens in real life. Once you've gotten off of it, you start to understand.

Quitting Twitter and quitting smoking, in that regard, felt much alike.


Ouch, yes, this really hasn't aged well.


The social principles of classical liberalism can’t not age well. They’re essentially timeless. More specifically, for example, the morality surrounding 3WF and TERFs isn’t exactly a settled debate. I’m not now taking a position on it either — just observing that different people have wildly different perspectives, and it is foolish to believe that there is one true moral position on this or any other hot topic on Twitter. I believe that’s the point that the author is making.


> Peter never trespassed into involving himself into the world of social justice. He couldn't be an authority in there

You're casually giving these self-proclaimed "authorities" ownership and a exclusive patent on discussion of our shared society.


Isn't it obvious that an underpriviledged person has more authority in the ___domain of being underpriviledged than a differently-priviledged person?


People who leave Twitter because they don't like the timeline that's based on who they follow are weird. Just unfollow people, and follow people who tweet things you like more.

Twitter has a tendency to put extra stuff in too, but you can control that by following or unfollowing topics.


Seems you haven't read the article as he never mentions not liking his timeline. His criticism is conceptually way beyond the Twitter timeline.




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