Linus Torvalds on Social Media: 'It's a Disease. It Seems To Encourage Bad Behavior.'

'From a wide-ranging interview of Linus Torvalds with Linux Journal on
the magazine's 25th anniversary: Linux Journal:

If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be?
Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social
media" -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to
encourage bad behavior. I think part of it is something that email
shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can
hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to
face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor
and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the
recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not
happen as easily with face-to-face interaction. But email still works.
You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally
some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and
"sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality
control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control,
with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things
designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral
outrage.

Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put
your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it
really doesn't help. I'm actually one of those people who thinks that
anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and
think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you
need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is
important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your
identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be
visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.

Linux Journal: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young
programmers/computer science students?
Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested
in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely
self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly
self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they
say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/03/1829244

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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