SivaLabs

SocialMedia is a double-edged sword. We can put it to good use or become addicted to it and suffer. The challenge is, it is hard to know when it became addiction. Most of the time we get to know that we are addicted to it once we started suffering.

I use social media, especially Twitter, very much mainly to keep up with what is going on in the tech world. I must say Twitter helped me in several ways throughout my career.

I usually share my learning on https://sivalabs.in and post it on Twitter, and this gave decent visibility to me and my blog. Most importantly, Twitter helped me to connect with amazing people in the Java Community.

However, lately I see some weirdness on Twitter which makes rethink about “Is Twitter still the right platform to share my thoughts or knowledge?”

Too much negativity

First of all, people on Twitter are so eager to tell you that “You are wrong”, “Your opinion is wrong, and my opinion is right”. I know that different people have different opinions. But that doesn’t mean that “others are wrong” just because “you have a different opinion”.

I agree that we should be open to criticism, but if you end up debating/clarifying for every damn thing, it is a waste of time.

Debates without understanding the context

This happens quite a lot on Twitter, especially when talking about “Software Architecture”.

Different people have different opinions based on their own experiences. Someone might have worked on very complex systems, and for them DDD, Clean/Hexagonal Architecture is a good fit. Someone else might have worked on applications which don’t have super complex business logic but handles huge traffic. For them, Clean/Hexagonal Architecture or DDD might seem overkill. Both of them are right.

But when someone shares their opinion on Twitter, there is a good chance to miss the context and endlessly debate why others are wrong. I believe one of the reasons is due Twitter’s 280-character limit people could not share more context of their opinion.

Conversations with sociopaths

You may accidentally end up having a conversation with a sociopath who doesn’t have basic manners, commonsense or any sense of humour. Those shitheads from then onwards wait for you tweet anything and then start replying with their bullshit. Thanks to Twitter for providing Block/Mute options.

So, considering all this, I believe blogging is much better to share your thoughts. As there is no character limit, it would be easy to provide more context on why you arrived at a certain opinion. For the people who want to reply also has plenty of opportunity to share their opinion and optionally explain why they have a contradicting opinion.

This reminds me of the good old days of DZone back in 2010. Back then, people used to write blog posts and share their articles on aggregator sites like DZone or JavaCodeGeeks etc. Then people used to share their views and even debate in a very respectable manner. I vividly remember people like Howard M. Lewis Ship (author of Tapestry framework), Jilles van Gurp etc used to discuss many topics in-depth from which I learned a lot.

Personal interactions

Recently I kind of stopped sharing opinions and debating on anything because of above mentioned reasons. Instead, I started connecting with people directly 1-on-1.

I met 3 people in-person whom I connected via Twitter online and we had a great time talking about various things ranging from software development to movies. Also, I connected with a couple of people online via Zoom calls who live in Germany/USA. It feels good to connect with fellow passionate software developers.

This approach feels much better than debating on Twitter without a shared context.

So, I decided to write more on blog and share on Twitter for reach and engage in discussion only on blog comment section.

I know people habituated to read small tweets and quickly reply (often knee-jerk reactions) than thinking through and engage in a meaningful conversations. But again they are not the people I/you may want to engage with, so losing those people is absolutely file.

If you want to reach out to me, you can get in touch with me on https://sivalabs.in or sivalabs.in@gmail.com.

Cheers.