j.r. leonard

It’s great for a different perspective on emergencies (an area of study of mine) and for insight into communities of interest that aren’t just the crafty-arty-nerdy sort you might have little or no exposure to... marginalized communities or folks with disabilities etc.

But that’s increasingly drowned out by the bad-default-enabled part of Twitter, which is sadly (but predictably) dialed to 11 by those defaults.

That is, basically, thumbing folks in the eye to feed your Id, because you can here with no negative consequences (besides soul rot). Which is a part of Twitter that absolutely requires anonymity to work.

None of the folks who use Twitter to vent their spleen get anything out of this space and largely make it *work* to keep it tolerable, because you have to constantly update your parameters to whack-a-mole if you weigh in on any conversation that triggers the trollnami.

I disagree. Some of my favorite content in Twitter are the parody accounts, like whoever does the fake North Korean news account. I can think of many reasons why parody account creators might wish to remain anonymous.

Granted those are funny. Are they worth having a system where some random LGBTQA teenager with depression issues gets their feed filled by shitposters for weeks or months?

That question implies a phony tradeoff and could just as easily be applied to the entire internet as well. Point is, I’d rather not have Twitter actively judging who is a shit poster and who is a legitimate parody. There are other ways to police abuse

The anonymity tradeoff is not phony, absent any sort of social trust mechanism. Twitter doesn’t have one, so the tradeoff applies here. It can be generally applied to the Internet at large in the meta sense but that’s not particularly relevant to this conversation