Conversation

People with crap-loaded long-handles and lots of irrelevant hashtags in tweets seem a bit like homeless people: wearing too many mismatched clothes, taking all their stuff everywhere in shopping carts. Similarity runs deeper: no Twitter-friends, only rant-targets.
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I strongly suspect there are “Twitter homeless” who have the same problem of social isolation, no online home, mental illness risks. Reliant entirely on impersonal algorithmic curation for their feed, visible as noise but not as humans to the connected, easily mistaken for bots.
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I think online homelessness is going to be as severe a problem as offline in the future, as more online life gets “urbanized” on the larger platforms.
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Replying to
Doesn't the Internet make it nearly effortless to join a new community, though? Even people who only post rants can be friends with other people who post similar rants. Or do you mean that the mentally ill will also have difficulties on the Internet similar to real life?
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Two friendless people ranting at each other do not provide much social connection to each other. Access is not enough. Relationships require minimum viable mental health online or offline.
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So the phenomenon is one that already exists in the physical world and will move to the Internet, or are you suggesting this is unique to the Internet? Perhaps that simply doing more things in the physical world leads to more social interaction?
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