> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it?
> These are people using Twitter with good intentions
I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous.
In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity.
There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other.
If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.
IMO this isn't just a Twitter thing. When I ran a company, we had a public forum that, in the beginning, was civilized. As we approached about 2000 people, that 5% you're talking about became so much of a problem that we had to shut them down. And in fact, it wasn't even 5% (100) people causing most of the problem: it was more like 10.
> These are people using Twitter with good intentions
I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous.
In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity.
There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other.
If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.