Should TAN ban X?

I’d guess a couple of things - immediacy and lack of paywalls (I think Joyce’s Times articles are generally paywalled, same for Ornstein and the Athletic).

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Twitter used to be a place where I could aggregate different sources together without visiting the individual websites.

That was probably the only thing I used that for.

This forum does a better job in finding people to post twitter feeds (bless you lot) so that I don’t have to spend the same amount of time anymore.

I do think social media needs a space where people arent getting shouted down by the toxic assholes and instead are free to discuss with whoever they want. Reddit is one approach which worked for a bit. But it’s too geeky in terms of UI.

If I can get relatively the same information from this alternate without needing to spend time sifting through the slagmire that’s twitter and then spending time verifying the sources. It’s better.

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And oh yeah. The lack of paywalls. You can get the gist of what the article is about by the tweets without needing to subscribe.

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You spelt “fuck” wrong.

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Yeah , you are anti social.

Both, actually.

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Edited the above for accuracy.

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Apart from the immediacy, they can signpost to alternative articles, answer questions much more freely or post things that wouldnt feature in an article. Sometimes, leading to interesting discussions between multiple experts in that area. And, your being directed from on site rather than lots of individual sites.

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The best thing with this new experiment. And it remains that.

AN_L can be sent to his korma corner and Ifti can be sent to his potato , brinjal one.

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Just like TAN then :grinning:

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I have asked a similar question to many people over the years, and this is by far the most common answer.

Isn’t this just an indictment of the shallow and superficial nature of modern society? “I need to be first!”

And aren’t immediate responses less likely to be considered and objective?

How many times have we all changed our minds after sitting down and thinking about whatever “it” may be?

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I use discord for gaming purposes. That also has its own set of toxic idiots.

But then I suppose with MMORPG’s and yes , I’ve gone back to playing Wow. That toxicity is pretty much unavoidable.

It’s still a lot less toxic than xitter though. As long as you stick yourself to just the raid talk (which can be fun at times)

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Oh for sure , we’ve got a lot of subject matter experts here.

To be fair, we have certain posters who appear to be experts on everything.

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It depends on the question or subject matter. If they have just published an article in a magazine that has prompted further questions from readers or responding to a tv show which has misrepresented evidence on something - they may already be on top of the latest research in the area.

Pretty sure that if ever this forum ever made a wow dungeon group.

Peaches will be the tank who keeps getting abused and take the brunt of the jokes as well

Cynnie will be the snarky DPS who keeps abusing people for not following dungeon rules.

Arminius will be the healer who’s too busy trying to put fires.

SBYM will be the particular DPS who just keeps ok picking on Peaches/Tank

Insert any other forum member for the last DPS slot.

I don’t need to be in some fantasy world to keep abusing people.

Thanks for the thought, though.

Cunt.

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Me! :slightly_smiling_face:

Badge of pride this.

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This.

But also, to me the true value for me previously before Musk fucked it up by destroying that exact function; was that when I followed the North Korean ballistic missile program, I had 2 professors I followed in the first days many years ago, but then I clicked on who they followed, and they I selectively followed their sources. This is how I made a very extensive network of expert sources on geopolitics.
Same with the Syrian civil war, the Russian invasion and of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can sieve out the activists that don’t have expertise this way (or who spreads misinformation or disinformation) and gain, with experience in filtering, an incredile timeline of information vastly superior than if I subscribed to quality newspapers. This does not work anymore. So these days I scan the timelines of sources I know have good heads, then I check the ones they re-tweet, then I scan their timelines again, if it looks serious (and when it comes to military analysis and geopolitics I have a rather good eye and head for that, since I already have far more background knowledge than most people on this earth) I click follow. If I see later that I made a mistake and that the source is not as knowledgable as myself or has a bad filter; i unfollow. But the ability to enter your favorite professor’s follower-list and then check those out, it is pure gold, no diamond. Same with OSINT. This way you only get the reliable sources and none of the low-brow or trollish ones. A bit harder these days, as you must manually hunt people’s timelines far more extensively.

Of course, you can do the same with sports. It’s not as serious of course, so “expertise” doesn’t matter that much, and liking someone’s opinions matter more in that field.

Of course. For almost a decade, I did not actually have a twitter account. I had a Word Document of links to twitter accounts that I then manually entered in my chosen browser (worked rather well, I seldom if ever feel the need to comment anyway and twitter is a bad platform for social discussions due to short word count), since I, previous to the Russian invasion, prefered to only read and learn incognito. But even before Musk took over, that became more difficult, so I was forced to create an account to even read all I wanted, but that is a digression I suppose.

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