Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

People are really freaking weird about personal accountability and twitter's terrible UI. Exchanges I see happen a lot:
Some random person who wants to get in a shouting match hits reply on something I RTed/someone's response to a post I made/someone's response to THAT and starts

shouting back and forth with someone, usually a scumbag I blocked when they first showed up to make it harder for them to rally in other scumbags/optimize the visibility on their scumbaggery.
I pull this person aside and say "hey, if you're going to continue that conversation,

tag me the hell out of it please?"
And then they get all angry and start shouting "I never tagged you in!" and bla bla bla and no, you did. Like, you didn't go out of your way to do it, but that's the default terrible UI of twitter. When you hit the reply button, above the prompt

it says "Replying to..." and a list of every possible @, and in order to display the same basic civil manners of not being the jerk who hits the Reply All button when responding to an e-mail, you have to click that, then the uncheck all button, otherwise it defaults to sending

whatever you type to all of those random people, most of whom you probably don't actively don't want to send it to, and don't want to see what you have to say. It's annoying and not terribly good design that it works that way (and indeed, most people seem to prefer the previous

UI where all the recipients appeared in the message field, eating into your character limit, and you had to delete the 20 you don't want to even fit the message), but that's the system, and ultimately the responsibility is still no you not to tell a couple dozen strangers to suck

on your genitals or whatever, because you were too lazy to not hit reply-all, and only wanted one specific person to do so.

Meanwhile, if you haven't done the thing I'm always encouraging everyone to do and just make a private list of all the people you want to follow and load

that up in front of the main page of twitter, logging into this site serves up a weird mix of posts from people you signed up to see posts from, and totally random crap that Twitter decides to throw at you, including ads, random chunks of the middle of conversations two strangers

were having 2 years ago, and other stuff that's none of your business. Again, it is weird and bad that Twitter does this. Twitter should not do this. But they do, and basic social etiquette dictates that you just kind of avert your eyes and keep scrolling by.

Instead though many

people see these random posts Twitter throws into their main feed for the hell of it, ignore the fact that they are from strangers, are on their feed and not in their mentions, and the dates on them, and proceed to respond like they are direct messages that were just sent to them

and honestly that's so weird of a thing to do it's hard to compare it to anything else?

Partially, it's like if you're watching TV and flip to a random channel, and then you respond to whatever the people on TV are saying like they're actually in the room and talking to you, but

when people actually do that, they're just shouting at a TV. Here, no, they are actually sending messages in real time to whatever random people they're seeing random recordings of from however long ago and that's just super unnerving.
And generally when you point out to such a

person that they are sending what is, generally, a weird aggressive message to a total stranger who absolutely did not in any way initiate a conversation with them, they will cite the fact that Twitter arbitrarily put a post in their feed like that's a counter-argument? And, no.

That's just the badly designed website spitting garbage at you, without the knowledge or consent of that garbage's original creator. It's not on them. You're supposed to just ignore it, and if you respond, you're actively being rude.

Of course, a careful observer will note that

even someone who DOES understand all of Twitter's terrible UI quirks and how to navigate around them, it's still rude, and a complete waste of your time to be sending angry violent messages to anyone, even the specific person you meant to, in a timely fashion based on what you're

responding to.

And honestly, that's like, 99% of what anyone has ever used any reply/comment functionality to do ever since it became a thing. So I guess ultimately my real point was that Web 2.0 was a terrible terrible mistake and we should all go back to having personal sites.

P.S. violethargrave.neocities.org I should update it more.

Also side note on this general subject- The other day some random nazi actually shouted some incredulous gibberish at me about having "so many posts and such low engagement" and while blocking and laughing I was thinking, wow

is this loser actually a Twitter executive on the side or something? Because WHO THE HELL ELSE IN THE WORLD keeps corporate-speak like "low engagement" in their bank of potential insults?

Anyway did I remind everyone if you do that private list thing you never end up seeing ads?