stephanie

so. presenting my late entry for meltdown may, titled Why i have to be an asshole sometimes on twitter dot com, with addenda titled Why the new reply limits are generally a good thing but should be watched carefully

why is twitter user isosteph so bitchy on here all the time? 1) sometimes i complain reactively abt shit that annoys me, like waves of soulless tech men overwhelming a city i love. this is called "regular bitching" and is a well understood phenomenon so let's move on

2) sometimes i am a dick when some influential vc posts some dumb & illogical shit and half the industry decides it's Art. this is bc i like tech! and think we could do some rly cool stuff if vcs didn't spend all their time praising Thought Leadership that often makes zero sense

personally in a world of such extensive & tight-gripped circlejerking i think it's totally fair game to be kind of an asshole when punching up on oneoff tweets! some vcs punch back in good humor, some vcs think this is "bullying" and that is because they are big babies

a big criticism of reply limits is How will we call out influential assholes when they are being assholes? imo this is what the quote tweet is for. i think everyone incl me should be subject to oneoff dunks and the quote tweet should be sacred

the big difference to me between qts and replies is that qts go to the quoter's audience whereas replies go to the op's audience, which means that asshole randos are highly incentivized to reply for attention. personally i get way more substanceless bullshit replies than qts

this might change with the new "retweets with comments" view which attaches qts to the op. this gives more impact to qts but also i think it'd be wrong to roll out reply limits without it as there needs to be some path to accountability visible from the original tweet

let's go back to 3) sometimes i am an asshole to my sweet, loyal, dumb followers. this apparently feels unjustified to many so let me explain that when u are a girl online, lots of men think it's ok to be extremely, insanely, terrifyingly familiar with u all the fucking time

esp when using my real name & face in a small industry it is very uncomfy to get flirty replies from eg the head of design at (big redacted co) or the former cto of (big redacted co) as well as random software engineers all over sf it's fucking weird as hell and i hate it!

and turns out when i finally snapped and started being an asshole to reply guys and following through on blocking them, the volume of uncomfortable & overfamiliar replies & dms went down by a lot. on the flip side i get more vicious harassment bc of course you can't win

not all women experience this and not all that do are bothered by it but a lot are! and until reply limits there was no way to avoid it besides telling people to fuck off all the time. i joined twitter fun & fresh & excited and i apologize but this is an unending wave of bullshit

reply limits aren't gonna Solve annoying idiots online but there are a lot of people here experiencing death by a thousand cuts every day and some kind of paradigm shift is needed. frankly i think the new implementation is fairly well thought out! but should be watched carefully