There's now a medium-sized amount of discussion of longtermism on Twitter, and I've noticed a bunch of people newly using it (such as some of those listed by Stefan Schubert here).
Twitter seems like a potentially underrated platform for longtermists. Like the EA Forum, Twitter promotes "liked" content. It allows us to follow content of interest to us. But it also differs from the EA Forum in some ways:
- It promotes concise discussion.
- It allows distribution of content to non-EA audiences.
- It allows reading content from non-EA contributors.
- It promotes content from top contributors to a greater degree.
Twitter also has some negative traits: it's potentially addictive, boosts (upvoted) political and emotional content. Unlike the EA Forum, it doesn't help longtermist content to be indexed, or attract as much within-group critique.
For better and for worse, I think the default path now is that Twitter forms a significant chunk of ongoing longtermist discourse. For long-form posts, I think many will be posted onto the EA Forum, Medium, or a personal blog, and then shared there.
Is there anything that needs to be done to adjust this trajectory? Mostly, the trajectory seems fine. Probably, some more posts on the EA Forum that are of widespread interest should be shared via Twitter. Probably, more effort should also be invested in mitigating politicisation and polarisation of the EA message there.
Edit: As a useful counterpoint, Tanner Greer argues that Twitter is turning the public sphere into just a "bare-knuckle brawl" here. If he's right: can we still participate in high-quality public conversation in Twitter? How can we best faciliate high-quality conversation in the public sphere without it? Or should we give up on that objective?
Welcome, and thanks for the contribution! I strongly agree with all three recommendations, and would point to #EconTwitter as a Twitter community that has managed to do all three very well.
Maintaining a strong code of conduct seems particularly useful. Different parts of Twitter have very different conversation norms, ranging from professional to degenerate and constructive to cruel. Norms are harder to build than to destroy, but ultimately individual people set the norm by what they tweet, so anyone can contribute to building the culture they want to see.
FWIW, my two cents would be to discourage more serious EA conversations from moving to Twitter. In my experience, it often brings out the worst in people and conversations. (It also has plenty of positives, and can be lots of fun.)