i feel like "it's bad on purpose to make you click" is still the most important fact about social media that people do not, on a gut level, understand, and i would like us to attempt to explain it in as many ways as possible until the point is clear
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here's one: hatred is a form of worship
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haters are fans too twitter.com/visakanv/statu…
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hatred is a form of worship and there are entities out there that exploit this fact to suck away as much of your energy as possible
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i t h u n g e r s f o r c l i c k s
twitter.com/mechanicalmonk
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("entities" and "energy" are being left deliberately vague, there are multiple accurate interpretations imo)
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this is a slightly more direct version of where i was trying to go with the vibe transmission thread. what i did not quite get around to saying there was: it matters what vibes you spread, it matters which tiny gods you make more real through worship
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the vibes of the tweets you RT are the vibes you "conduct" into the world even if you don't tweet much. if you cultivate good vibe taste you can meaningfully change the vibes other people in your corner of twitter see even with very little original content
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so to be clear, i definitely don't intend to be heading towards "good vibes only," or at least it depends a lot on what "good" means. i talk about sad stuff like 30-70% of the time and i think it's basically been net positive and i'd stop if it wasn't
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
like i get this but also sometimes i feel really guilty for sharing pain or sorrow even though those are also true- its “bad vibes” and i think the balance of being honest and not dragging people into a black hole can be hard (for me, a sadgirl)
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if i wanted to [naval voice] it i might say vibe is much less about content and much more about intent. you can share a really sad thing with an incredibly "positive" vibe if the intent is to give people hope that things can get better, help them feel less alone, etc.
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one of the many tricky things here is that intent means your *real, actual* intent, much of which is subconscious by default. if your actual intent is e.g. manipulation that often comes through, possibly subconsciously, possibly even through a single tweet
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this bit from visa elsewhere in the thread is a good example re: intent (click through for more context)
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Replying to @visakanv and @QiaochuYuan
but the point is that my first impulse was to use a person, or the idea of a person, as a sort of prop in my little theatre act. I was startled, a little sickened, and it made me re-evaluate and rethink everything. still jars. how naturally it came to me
twitter.com/visakanv/statu
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it's bad on purpose to make you click
it has been bad on purpose long since clicking was a thing, conflict and division are some of the primary energy-intake sources of media egregores and they will find any excuse to generate it at the expense of accurate coverageShow this thread