Twitter psychiatry
While a wave of “september newbies” has arrived on the fediverse, writing the post I wrote causes discussion when I predict that, as in other waves of twitter users, the undertow will bring them back. I mean, those users who migrated from Twitter to the Fediverso will soon be coming back.
The thing you need to understand first is that Twitter (as well as F!) Are environments that are not only toxic, but intoxicating. That is, they produce addiction. The twitter user, that is, has been immersed in a kind of environment that intoxicates and produces addiction, since he was a child.
The relationship that users have with this toxicity is, as for all victims of an addiction, of love-hate. All the toxic sides of Twitter, so to speak, are portrayed as the things they hate about Twitter. The trouble is, they are also the things a twitter user can't live without.
In general, the Twitter user's personality slowly moves, by various points, in the Narcissistic Personality Disorder spectrum.The difference is that Twitter is not built to produce a personal narcissistic phenomenon, but to produce narcissistic disturbances of group.
To be clear, a possible phenomenon on twitter is this:
Here Paul Vixie came out like a gentleman, but ultimately this "Xavier Ashe" really believed he could explain DNS to Paul Vixie. The trouble is that Paul Vixie is one of the authors of BIND, I mean … well, this is it:
Contributors to Wikimedia projects 
What does this madness allow? To understand the narcissistic delusion just look at the profile of this Xavier.
And if you ever had the doubt that @TAGInfosec is something important, capable of giving you any authority, we can go and visit it, and …
Damn. A world authority.
This is the twitter problem: juniors with two years of experience posing as gurus, people who have learned to make a boat with paper posing as great captains, and so on.
It's time to say it: Twitter is the place where people pose, and the more they pose, the more others who pose will recognize the validity of their pose, and the pleasure of seeing their pose accredited produces a state of pleasure. hallucinatory. An addictive hallucination.
The problem is that Twitter, by reducing the number of possible characters, makes "Schroedinger's sarcasm" possible. It makes it possible to respond to someone with a very short bullshit, and then decide, subsequently, if it was sarcasm or if it was simply an ambiguous sentence.
If you say that 2 + 2 = 5 on twitter, that is, they won't tell you that for obvious reasons two plus two equals four (and don't bother me with rings, groups and other structures that YOU don't understand shit about, pls), but unfortunately there is no space to write why.
On twitter, that is, there are those who say they know without knowing, trusting in the excuse "I don't have enough characters to really tell you how much I know, but I can only say that I know a lot".
Not for nothing have I just had a fight with a twitter fugitive who was an expert in psychology and semiotics of science, she is sixteen, and cannot articulate a text longer than three sentences. (although on Mastodon he would have room to do so).
On twitter, however, she would have won. Because it would have been enough for her to put a photograph of her decollete to have 5000 "friends". Which would have agreed in any discussion, creating a shitstorm around those who contested it.
And here is the point: Twitter acts on the minds of its users allowing them to have a deformed, huge image of themselves, to the point of seriously believing that they can explain DNS and their security to Paul Vixie.
This image gives them a feeling of pleasure: with each controversy it triggers the flow of dopamine in their mind, and when they have the possibility of appearing superior to someone else, it produces the rush of serotonin.
Trouble is, that's the action of those addictive drugs.
The reason why former twitter users do not resist much in the fediverse, or in other places where interactions between users are not produced by the exact same algorithm, is precisely that the right environment is missing:
- there aren't many stars. You cannot enter the Burioni or Capua fans to feel superior to the no-vax.
- there aren't many journalists, or TV people: in this way you can't even fool yourself into showing your superiority in front of the world.
- there is no algorithm that selects the most widespread controversies to propose them in the home timeline.
- there is no possibility of causing the expulsion of a person through group signaling, that is, the phenomenon of cancel culture ceases.
this inevitably reduces the entity and importance of small controversies, which inevitably feed the user's narcissistic ego. As if that weren't enough, these controversies induce the production of adrenaline, which in turn produces addiction.
The result is that the Twitter user is a gassed, quarrelsome bimbominkia. Worse still, it has a pathological need to be. The tragedy is that it can only be on Twitter.
This is the reason why every Twitter migration I have witnessed has resulted in a whole series of avatars in the shape of eyes, feet, hands, black and white photos, arriving, confronting the lack of drugs, and come back to Twitter.
In addition to advising you to block any account of the fediverse that uses an eye as an avatar, if you are on the fediverse I recommend that you wait a little. Soon, in withdrawal from narcissism, the bimbiminkia will return to the bird.
