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