Twitter Is Terrible. Here Is How We Can Fix It. | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, so let's do a Cal Reacts to the News segment.

00:00:05.000 | As promised, I want to talk about this article

00:00:10.200 | from The Atlantic online.

00:00:11.980 | It's titled, "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life

00:00:14.040 | Has Been Uniquely Stupid."

00:00:15.240 | In the magazine, it was called "After Babel,"

00:00:19.360 | and is an epic article by,

00:00:21.800 | I'm gonna say friend of the show.

00:00:24.200 | What I mean is someone that people who've listened

00:00:26.160 | to this show enjoy, John Haidt.

00:00:29.720 | So I've talked to John Haidt once or twice.

00:00:32.120 | I don't know him well, but I really respect his work.

00:00:35.360 | Because he has psychology training,

00:00:36.800 | he can work with literatures in an academic way,

00:00:39.120 | but also has a real mind towards cultural criticism

00:00:43.180 | and public facing work, which I think is great.

00:00:44.880 | So I'm a big John Haidt fan.

00:00:45.920 | So I was excited to see this article.

00:00:47.440 | I'm gonna read just a few highlights.

00:00:49.280 | Some highlighted sentences from this article,

00:00:52.040 | then I'm gonna give you some thoughts on it.

00:00:53.880 | All right, so one thing he says here is,

00:00:57.280 | "Something went terribly wrong very suddenly

00:01:01.640 | with America in the 2010s."

00:01:05.200 | As he clarifies, "In the first decade of the new century,"

00:01:10.200 | so the 2000 to the late 2000, like 2009, 2010,

00:01:13.960 | "Social media was widely believed

00:01:16.760 | to be a boon to democracy."

00:01:19.080 | Haidt argues, "The high point of techno-democratic optimism

00:01:23.160 | was arguably 2011, a year that began

00:01:26.960 | with the Arab Spring

00:01:27.920 | and ended with the global Occupy movement."

00:01:30.800 | He goes on, however, to say, okay, and he clarifies also,

00:01:37.440 | "In their early incarnations,

00:01:38.920 | platforms such as MySpace and Facebook

00:01:40.640 | were relatively harmless.

00:01:42.400 | They allowed users to create pages

00:01:43.960 | on which to post photos, family updates,

00:01:45.760 | and link to mostly static pages

00:01:48.200 | of their friends and favorite bands.

00:01:51.040 | In this way, early social media can be seen

00:01:52.860 | as just another step in the long progression

00:01:54.600 | of technological improvements from the postal service

00:01:56.600 | through the telephone to email and texting,

00:01:59.200 | all of which helped people achieve the eternal goal

00:02:01.440 | of maintaining their social ties."

00:02:03.880 | All right?

00:02:04.880 | So John Haidt is setting things up

00:02:06.720 | where there's gonna be this fall, the 2010s.

00:02:10.080 | And in the first decade of the 2000s,

00:02:11.600 | basically we are in a more eidonic, eidetic time

00:02:16.600 | where social media was great.

00:02:20.280 | It was helping people connect to their friends and bands

00:02:22.960 | and get new information.

00:02:25.200 | And it was helping to overthrow dictators

00:02:26.960 | and everyone's really happy.

00:02:28.360 | And what he argues is there was a major change.

00:02:33.600 | So what was this major change that happened to social media

00:02:36.540 | that set up the fall that he talks about in this piece?

00:02:40.720 | Well, he goes on to give his theory.

00:02:43.640 | He says, okay, look, in 2009 and before,

00:02:47.520 | if you're on Facebook, you had a simple timeline,

00:02:50.920 | a never-ending stream of content

00:02:52.240 | generated by friends and connections

00:02:53.480 | with the newest post at the top

00:02:54.720 | and the oldest at the bottom.

00:02:56.280 | That began to change in 2009

00:02:58.240 | when Facebook offered users a way to publicly like posts

00:03:02.000 | with the click of a button.

00:03:03.640 | That same year, Twitter introduced

00:03:04.880 | something even more powerful, the retweet button,

00:03:07.640 | which allowed users to publicly endorse a post

00:03:10.160 | while also sharing it with all their followers.

00:03:12.360 | Facebook soon copied that innovation

00:03:13.900 | with its own share button,

00:03:14.840 | which became available to smartphone users in 2012.

00:03:17.960 | Like and share buttons quickly became standard

00:03:20.480 | on most social media platforms.

00:03:24.460 | Shortly after its like button began to produce data

00:03:29.320 | about what best engaged its users,

00:03:30.920 | Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user

00:03:33.200 | the content most likely to generate a like

00:03:35.340 | or some other interaction,

00:03:36.920 | eventually including the share as well.

00:03:39.240 | By 2013, social media had become a new game

00:03:42.280 | with dynamics unlike those in 2008.

00:03:44.760 | If you were skillful or lucky,

00:03:45.960 | you might create a post that would go viral

00:03:47.480 | and make you internet famous for a few days.

00:03:49.160 | If you blundered, you could find yourself buried

00:03:50.840 | in hateful comments.

00:03:52.760 | This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics.

00:03:55.560 | Users were guided not just by their true preferences,

00:03:57.740 | but by their past experiences of reward and punishment

00:04:01.040 | and the prediction of how others would react

00:04:02.920 | to each new action.

00:04:05.300 | So that is the story that Hyte tells

00:04:11.080 | for what is essentially the fall of social media,

00:04:16.080 | the fall from grace of social media.

00:04:18.280 | So this is a story, it's a tale of techno determinism.

00:04:22.080 | I talk about this in digital minimalism.

00:04:23.960 | I've talked about this in an article I wrote

00:04:26.800 | for the communications of the ACM.

00:04:28.600 | It's a point I've been making a lot recently,

00:04:31.640 | which is we have to be incredibly aware

00:04:33.760 | of unintentional techno social dynamics

00:04:35.760 | where a technology introduced for one period

00:04:38.200 | can have massive influences that we weren't expecting.

00:04:41.360 | And we should be monitoring those and aware of those

00:04:43.920 | and reacting to those.

00:04:45.000 | And we often don't.

00:04:46.360 | And as Hyte says,

00:04:47.200 | this is what happened with the like and retweet button.

00:04:49.480 | It completely changed the character of social media.

00:04:53.040 | Where social media used to be about connecting to people,

00:04:55.800 | posting information, connecting,

00:04:57.040 | it became instead about viral dynamics.

00:05:00.360 | What's gonna be a hit?

00:05:02.400 | What is going to avoid me being attacked?

00:05:05.160 | You don't have that without retweet.

00:05:06.680 | You don't have that without likes.

00:05:07.960 | But once it became this algorithmic stream

00:05:10.200 | with viral dynamics, it completely changed the character.

00:05:13.660 | It wasn't the intention.

00:05:15.580 | As I talk about in my book, "Digital Minimalism",

00:05:18.220 | the intention of the like button originally

00:05:20.220 | was that engineers thought it was not elegant.

00:05:23.120 | That someone would post a photo on Facebook

00:05:27.280 | and so many comments would say more or less the same thing.

00:05:30.320 | Awesome, cool, great, good.

00:05:33.120 | Like, well, let's just put a like button in

00:05:34.360 | so that if all you're gonna say is like, that's great,

00:05:37.140 | just click that button and we'll count up

00:05:39.000 | how many people said that

00:05:39.960 | so that you don't have to waste time

00:05:41.000 | scrolling through comments

00:05:41.840 | that are all just simple positive affirmations.

00:05:44.340 | That was the point of the like button.

00:05:45.600 | But almost immediately,

00:05:46.440 | it completely changed the dynamics of Facebook

00:05:48.480 | because A, it made it more addictive

00:05:50.600 | because you began to care about

00:05:51.780 | how many likes your things got.

00:05:53.480 | And B, it gave them data that they could use

00:05:56.120 | to create algorithmically generated streams,

00:05:57.920 | which broke the whole model of I know you.

00:06:00.860 | And Facebook is great because I can see what you're up to.

00:06:04.080 | And made into this model of, oh my God,

00:06:06.400 | what am I seeing in my newsfeed?

00:06:07.760 | This is interesting, this is outrageous,

00:06:09.640 | this is emotionally engaged,

00:06:10.840 | and it completely changed the dynamic.

00:06:13.240 | So is that a bad thing?

00:06:14.080 | Well, Haidt says it's undermining democracy.

00:06:16.640 | It is like one of the worst things to happen

00:06:18.440 | is the social media platforms going towards

00:06:21.320 | this optimized streams that create,

00:06:23.800 | equipped with or augmented with viral dynamics.

00:06:26.520 | He gives three things he said went wrong

00:06:28.180 | once we switched to this.

00:06:29.440 | Number one, it gave more power to tools and provocateurs

00:06:35.760 | while silencing good citizens.

00:06:39.240 | Number two, this approach gave more power

00:06:42.760 | and voice to the political extremes

00:06:45.400 | while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.

00:06:49.720 | Because again, when you have viral dynamics

00:06:51.880 | in terms of both praise and attack,

00:06:53.880 | you migrate to the extremes.

00:06:57.280 | A, you're not gonna get shared for saying things moderate,

00:06:59.320 | and two, the extremes are gonna be motivated to pile on

00:07:03.600 | or try to attack people that seem like

00:07:05.240 | they're drifting from it.

00:07:06.320 | He cites the pro-democracy group More in Common,

00:07:10.280 | a very important survey.

00:07:12.600 | Back in 2017, they surveyed 8,000 Americans

00:07:16.040 | and they split the Americans up into seven groups

00:07:18.840 | that shared beliefs and behaviors.

00:07:21.280 | And they found that devoted conservatives

00:07:24.480 | comprised 6% of the US population,

00:07:27.480 | and the group furthest to the left,

00:07:29.600 | what they called progressive activists,

00:07:31.080 | comprised just 8% of the population.

00:07:33.380 | And the progressive activists in particular

00:07:37.000 | were the most prolific group on social media.

00:07:40.200 | 70% had shared political content over the previous years,

00:07:43.000 | and the devoted conservatives were also very active

00:07:45.160 | on social media.

00:07:46.240 | At least 56% had shared political content.

00:07:51.240 | And the irony, he points out, is that those two groups

00:07:54.500 | tend to be both richer than the average American

00:07:56.800 | and wider than the average American.

00:07:58.400 | So that we have, quote, two subsets of the elite

00:08:01.320 | who are not representative of the broader society

00:08:02.960 | that are completely driving

00:08:04.840 | sort of extreme conversation on social media.

00:08:09.680 | Finally, he says, "Social media in this new form

00:08:13.320 | deputize everyone to administer justice

00:08:15.680 | with no due process.

00:08:17.480 | Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West

00:08:19.860 | with no accountability for vigilantes.

00:08:22.720 | A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes

00:08:25.000 | and follow-on strikes.

00:08:25.880 | Enhanced virality platforms

00:08:27.320 | thereby facilitate massive collective punishment

00:08:29.520 | for small or imagined offenses

00:08:31.520 | with real-world consequences,

00:08:32.820 | including innocent people losing their jobs

00:08:34.800 | and being shamed into suicide.

00:08:36.320 | When our public square is governed by mob dynamics,

00:08:38.520 | unrestrained by due process,

00:08:39.840 | we don't get justice and inclusion.

00:08:42.200 | We get a society that ignores context,

00:08:44.040 | proportionality, mercy, and truth."

00:08:47.480 | So we get that happening as well.

00:08:50.160 | That is, again, another point I will just say,

00:08:53.120 | I hear this a lot in conversations about social media,

00:08:58.120 | content, content moderations.

00:08:59.760 | This came up, I think, in the context

00:09:01.320 | of last week's discussion of Elon Musk and Twitter,

00:09:04.160 | where people say, "No, I think it's good.

00:09:07.920 | Look, it's good that there's blowback.

00:09:10.020 | If you're worried about saying something,

00:09:13.260 | that means you should be worried about saying it."

00:09:15.960 | And you often hear the phrase,

00:09:17.540 | "Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

00:09:20.100 | You can say what you want,

00:09:21.520 | but you have to be ready for the consequences."

00:09:23.040 | And I think what Haidt is pointing out here is

00:09:25.880 | that on its own is a vacuous statement.

00:09:28.320 | You look at any example in history

00:09:31.860 | where there is a clearly, let's say,

00:09:33.900 | authoritarian regime dispensing arbitrary dictatorial justice.

00:09:38.900 | So let's look at Stalin throwing people into the Gulag.

00:09:43.180 | If you were to go there and see what was going on,

00:09:46.480 | he was not just saying, "I have arbitrary power,

00:09:50.500 | and I'm putting you in the Gulag because I don't like you,

00:09:53.140 | and what are you going to do about it?"

00:09:54.540 | No, there'd be a trial.

00:09:56.260 | And he would say, look,

00:09:57.540 | he would say the similar sort of thing.

00:09:59.340 | What you say, "Things have consequences.

00:10:01.060 | You were treasonous to the country.

00:10:02.980 | This treason's going to unsettle the communist utopia.

00:10:07.220 | Like, you know, your actions have consequences,

00:10:10.100 | and you're doing something dangerous.

00:10:11.660 | You need to go to the Gulag."

00:10:12.500 | I mean, that's true of any time, anywhere.

00:10:15.660 | So what you have to do, of course,

00:10:16.960 | is with some humanity and common sense,

00:10:19.620 | just look at the particular context and say,

00:10:22.420 | is this largely actually just, or is it disproportionate?

00:10:25.420 | So if you're in Stalin's Russia,

00:10:26.540 | you would say this is very disproportionate.

00:10:28.100 | He's sending people to the Gulag

00:10:29.660 | clearly because he just doesn't like them,

00:10:31.460 | or they're not on his team,

00:10:32.460 | or he's trying to make sure that he can preserve power.

00:10:35.020 | And obviously things aren't that bad now,

00:10:37.140 | but I think a lot of neutral observers

00:10:38.940 | looking at the swiftness and virality of pylons,

00:10:41.780 | both on the left and right,

00:10:42.900 | would say this can't possibly be proportional and just.

00:10:46.940 | It just doesn't seem that way.

00:10:48.420 | Our common sense is saying that's not true.

00:10:50.220 | So I don't buy the argument of,

00:10:52.580 | hey, you can say what you want, consequences,

00:10:56.700 | but you can't be free from consequences.

00:10:58.660 | That applies in every context.

00:11:00.180 | What matters is, are the consequences we've seen,

00:11:03.340 | as Haidt would say, proportional, merciful, and truthful?

00:11:06.740 | And often they're not, and it's because, as Haidt points out,

00:11:10.180 | the viral dynamics of these platforms

00:11:13.500 | have pushed out most of the middle,

00:11:16.060 | pushed out most normal people.

00:11:18.060 | We have these two extremes on either side,

00:11:20.740 | completely disproportionate of the population

00:11:24.100 | that not only control the conversation,

00:11:25.980 | but are doing so in an incredibly aggressive way

00:11:27.860 | because they're trying to play the dynamics

00:11:29.740 | of great viral reward while avoiding

00:11:32.660 | or participating in great viral punishment.

00:11:34.540 | And so it really is a wild west

00:11:36.340 | of a small number of disproportionate vigilantes

00:11:39.060 | running around.

00:11:40.260 | And he thinks that's very destabilizing,

00:11:42.660 | and I think he's probably true.

00:11:44.220 | All right, so what do we do about it?

00:11:48.380 | Well, I don't have a definitive answer,

00:11:51.100 | but there's a couple points I wanna make.

00:11:53.900 | First of all, I think I am somewhat alone

00:11:57.740 | in my argument that I do not think Twitter

00:12:00.780 | is as fundamental as everyone else does.

00:12:02.700 | Haidt makes this point,

00:12:04.700 | Elon Musk has recently made this point.

00:12:06.460 | They're all saying this is the town square,

00:12:08.100 | it's critical to democracy,

00:12:09.300 | that's why we really have to care about it.

00:12:11.460 | I don't think it's critical to democracy,

00:12:13.020 | I don't think it's the town square.

00:12:15.460 | I think if Haidt is right, that what Twitter is

00:12:17.580 | is 11% of the population segregated at the extremes

00:12:22.340 | playing this weird viral vigilante game

00:12:25.500 | of viral reward and viral punishment,

00:12:28.540 | maybe being observed by a larger group of people

00:12:31.460 | who find the emotions of this kind of entertaining.

00:12:33.980 | This is not the public town square.

00:12:37.340 | This is the Colosseum.

00:12:39.780 | This is the gladiator to the fights to the death

00:12:44.340 | that people in Rome will wander over to watch

00:12:46.380 | 'cause it's bloody and interesting

00:12:48.340 | and is better than doing something else,

00:12:50.580 | it's kind of exciting,

00:12:52.020 | but it's not at the core of democracy,

00:12:53.340 | and how do we know that?

00:12:54.540 | 'Cause what would happen if, for whatever reason,

00:12:57.580 | let's say Elon succeeds and his latest thing

00:13:00.140 | is he wants to buy Twitter, he made an offer,

00:13:01.740 | let's say he just shuts it down.

00:13:03.700 | Nothing bad would happen.

00:13:05.860 | 85% of the country or 90% of the country

00:13:09.380 | wouldn't even notice 'cause most people don't use Twitter.

00:13:12.300 | You don't need Twitter to report the news,

00:13:14.980 | you don't need Twitter to be a politician,

00:13:16.580 | you don't need Twitter to be entertaining,

00:13:18.940 | nothing bad would happen.

00:13:20.740 | People would barely notice.

00:13:22.020 | It would have less of an impact

00:13:24.820 | than supply chain disruption for toilet paper.

00:13:29.620 | So how could that be critical to the town square?

00:13:33.300 | It's a Colosseum, it's not the Roman Senate.

00:13:37.860 | That is my argument.

00:13:39.020 | So once we recognize that, then I would argue

00:13:42.860 | we need to downgrade the importance of Twitter.

00:13:44.660 | It's weird, it's this weird 240 characters

00:13:48.220 | or whatever it is now with these weird viral dynamics

00:13:50.620 | and these little boxes with these threads

00:13:52.140 | and it's this weird bloody gladiator game

00:13:53.940 | and we say I'm leaving the Colosseum.

00:13:55.780 | And here's what I think we need instead.

00:13:57.780 | A, we replace the distraction that Twitter gives,

00:14:01.660 | whoever it gives distraction to with better distraction.

00:14:03.940 | There's better things to do if you're bored.

00:14:06.140 | Yeah, it's exciting, but listen to a podcast,

00:14:08.980 | read a book, have a better hobby.

00:14:10.380 | There's all sorts of things you can do

00:14:11.860 | that are interesting and entertaining,

00:14:13.620 | more so than these weird short character threads

00:14:17.460 | of extreme people fighting each other.

00:14:20.660 | Two, I think social media itself needs to fragment much more

00:14:24.260 | and get back more towards that 2000 to 2009 period

00:14:28.300 | where it is about connecting to people

00:14:30.860 | that you find interesting and know, expressing yourself.

00:14:34.620 | Social media should be more niche.

00:14:36.780 | It should be more about like people felt MySpace

00:14:39.420 | was in the early days or Facebook was in the early days.

00:14:41.900 | Here is a group of amateur bicyclists

00:14:45.940 | and we connect with each other

00:14:47.860 | and we share photos of our rides

00:14:49.500 | and encourage each other.

00:14:50.460 | And we have our own norms and our own way of talking.

00:14:54.180 | And it's great.

00:14:55.020 | And I'm glad it exists

00:14:56.020 | because there's not enough amateur cyclists

00:14:57.780 | who live near me to actually like meet that many people.

00:15:00.100 | And that's what social media should be.

00:15:02.140 | It should not try to be a virtual town square.

00:15:04.740 | There should not be a service

00:15:05.860 | that everyone feels like they have to use.

00:15:08.020 | That doesn't work.

00:15:10.460 | Finally, C, we need better ways

00:15:14.460 | for those who actually do have important, useful

00:15:18.340 | or thought provoking information to share

00:15:19.980 | to use the internet to share that.

00:15:21.580 | There is no reason why the best and brightest,

00:15:24.060 | the most interesting, the smartest,

00:15:27.380 | the most engaging thinkers and writers out there

00:15:30.300 | should be constrained to a small number of characters,

00:15:34.140 | retweets and linking and adding

00:15:36.660 | and all of these weird arbitrary rules

00:15:38.380 | that serve to do nothing but virality.

00:15:40.580 | And virality is not useful

00:15:43.020 | for giving you the ability to share and express yourself

00:15:47.540 | and to hear what other people are saying.

00:15:48.580 | It's really not that useful for it.

00:15:49.940 | The internet existed before the retweet.

00:15:52.060 | Social media and internet existed before the like button.

00:15:53.980 | So I think we need perhaps an earlier web 2.0 type approach,

00:15:58.980 | podcasts, blogs, individual websites

00:16:01.980 | where you can express yourself at length and in detail.

00:16:04.500 | And yes, it's harder to find attention

00:16:08.700 | when you're kind of on your own,

00:16:10.060 | but that I think is a feature.

00:16:12.020 | That means you're gonna gather a more focused crowd.

00:16:16.100 | The best will rise to the top.

00:16:17.780 | You know, yeah, most podcasts don't get listened to,

00:16:20.740 | but ones that are interesting get big audiences.

00:16:22.700 | It's harder, but it's longer form, it's more nuanced,

00:16:25.420 | and it doesn't have viral dynamics.

00:16:27.420 | It doesn't create these weird pushes to the extremes.

00:16:30.060 | I wrote an article about this for Wired Magazine

00:16:32.500 | early in the pandemic, where I said,

00:16:34.780 | the best thing we could do

00:16:36.260 | from a public health perspective

00:16:37.940 | for during the pandemic would probably shut down Twitter.

00:16:41.700 | It's just gonna make people crazy.

00:16:43.060 | It's gonna push people in weird directions.

00:16:44.580 | It's not gonna help our psychological

00:16:48.420 | or physical health during a pandemic.

00:16:49.740 | And my argument in that Wired piece was

00:16:52.100 | we should go back to blogs for medical experts,

00:16:54.260 | and they should be hosted on institutional websites

00:16:56.980 | so we trust it.

00:16:58.220 | Oh, this doctor works for this medical network.

00:17:03.220 | The blog is posted on that network.

00:17:06.100 | Like we're already validating,

00:17:07.580 | like this is where this person comes from.

00:17:09.100 | Here's why I should trust them.

00:17:10.060 | And he's not doing tweet threads of screenshotted charts.

00:17:13.300 | He can write a real article.

00:17:15.140 | And yeah, if you wanted to use social media to say,

00:17:16.940 | I published a new article, you can find it here, fine.

00:17:20.620 | But that was the appropriate form

00:17:22.620 | 'cause it allows us to do curation

00:17:24.260 | of who we should be listening to, to get more information,

00:17:26.180 | to have context, to have nuance.

00:17:27.900 | Twitter was a terrible medium for that type of discussion.

00:17:31.140 | So I think we need to go back or forward,

00:17:32.980 | we could even say, to a way of communicating,

00:17:35.860 | expressing ourself that doesn't constrain us

00:17:37.620 | to these weird, narrow platforms

00:17:39.300 | that are built around virality and active user minutes,

00:17:42.700 | not around the most effective ways to convey information.

00:17:46.700 | All right, so that's my thoughts on this general point.

00:17:50.900 | I think John Haidt is right and perceptive.

00:17:54.460 | I think he clarified better.

00:17:55.620 | I've made this argument, he clarifies it a little bit better

00:17:58.900 | that as you shifted from, the way I usually put it

00:18:02.220 | is as you shifted from the wall to the newsfeed,

00:18:05.300 | as you shifted from looking at friends' posts

00:18:08.700 | to liking and retweeting,

00:18:10.340 | you got these weird viral dynamics

00:18:12.020 | that transformed the social media landscape

00:18:15.140 | into this weird group of extremes and vigilantes

00:18:19.940 | that's had a huge negative effect.

00:18:21.380 | And again, most people don't use Twitter,

00:18:23.180 | but reporters use it, politicians use it,

00:18:26.100 | corporate executives look at it,

00:18:27.980 | and it has, so therefore, a huge outsized effect.

00:18:30.300 | And to me, again, it's not the town square,

00:18:33.780 | it's not the Roman Senate, it's the Colosseum.

00:18:36.100 | And we're letting the bloody combat in the Colosseum,

00:18:39.100 | as entertaining as it is to look at in the moment,

00:18:41.100 | we're letting that actually dictate

00:18:42.380 | the way the rest of us live their lives,

00:18:44.740 | how news is covered, how politicians act as legislatures,

00:18:49.740 | how companies set policy or change their directives

00:18:55.300 | or initiatives, or even decide who to hire or fire.

00:18:57.620 | And this is crazy, the Colosseum

00:18:59.420 | should not have a major role.

00:19:00.980 | There is nothing fundamental about this technology.

00:19:02.700 | We can do better with the internet,

00:19:04.740 | and I hope we actually do.

00:19:07.860 | So that's my thought on John Haidt's article on Twitter.

00:19:10.100 | So good job, John Haidt.

00:19:11.820 | And that would be what I add to it.

00:19:15.140 | I mean, the one exception where we do need Twitter,

00:19:18.540 | I think is Baseball Trade Rumors,

00:19:20.580 | 'cause I need that information fast.

00:19:22.220 | But hey, look, that's an example though.

00:19:24.620 | Yeah, Twitter is good for getting

00:19:26.340 | Baseball Trade Rumor information fast,

00:19:29.100 | but there's a website, mlbtraderumors.com,

00:19:31.820 | that works just as well, and it's focused on just that.

00:19:34.940 | And I'll tell you something, and then I'll let this go,

00:19:37.740 | but I'll tell you something.

00:19:39.140 | That is where I went to see what was going on

00:19:42.620 | in the highly compressed free agency that happened in March

00:19:45.060 | after the collective bargaining agreement

00:19:46.980 | was made, finalized for MLB,

00:19:49.700 | because specifically I did not wanna go to Twitter

00:19:51.860 | to see what the baseball reporters were saying,

00:19:53.340 | because Twitter was gonna push in my face

00:19:55.660 | terrible, terrifying news about Ukraine

00:19:57.700 | and nuclear war and about COVID.

00:19:59.900 | And I was like, I don't wanna go to the Colosseum

00:20:02.500 | to find out about my team.

00:20:04.740 | And so I went to a special purpose website,

00:20:06.780 | got the news I wanted without the stress.

00:20:09.340 | So case in point, that's the future we need.

00:20:12.340 | (upbeat music)

00:20:14.940 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:20:18.280 | (upbeat music)

Twitter Is Terrible. Here Is How We Can Fix It. | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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