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SMILE AND WAVE

The World's Unfriendliest Neighbor, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'

Adwait
Adwait
The World's Unfriendliest Neighbor, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'
AI writing tools going unchecked, a bold stance against getting to know your neighbors, a very specific AAPI blunder by a streaming site and if you thought age gap discourse could get worse, think again.
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Every day somebody says or does something that earns them the scorn of the internet. Here at Digg, as part of our mission to curate what the internet is talking about right now, we rounded up the main characters on Twitter from this past week and held them accountable for their actions.



This week's characters include a writer who wants us to be friends with machines, a very unfriendly neighbor, a Twitter post that should have been vetted better and a comment on relationship age gaps that took Twitter by storm.


There were also some special mentions, including Bryce Dallas Howard with some bad hustle culture advice, a ridiculously poor reaction to racist fans in your stadium from a Spanish soccer team, someone who thinks adults eating jam and toast is childish, a real estate developer oblivious of how risk works when it comes to natural disasters and a guy who got owned by Andy Dufresne himself.



Wednesday

James Yu

The character: James Yu, sci-fi writer, generative writer, bad idea generator

The plot: James Yu's Twitter account was made in 2006, which automatically makes him one of the oldest accounts on the site, and it tells me that Yu's been online for much longer than most of us have. He's a writer who codes, or a coder who writes, and his latest endeavor was an "AI-tool for writing long-form stories."

Not everyone is concerned with AI, and it's inevitable that tech like this would emerge. Yu's vision is one were writers and machines work on a narrative together, but that wasn't how people saw it.


The repercussion: While AI and its applications in content generation (for a lack of a better term) are still a contentious topic — who owns the rights, whose material is the AI learning from, and so on — it's clear that Yu's idea was not a hit among writers on Twitter. It's also not a good look when you've already been called out for being a dunce.


Adwait Patil



Wednesday

The Twitch Twitter account

The character: Twitch, specifically their Twitter account and whoever runs it

The plot: For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, most companies try and do something nice to acknowledge it. Twitch, the live streaming platform owned by Amazon, thought it was posting an innocent tweet or two but ended up doing something more tone deaf and racist than we could expect.

Saiyans from Dragon Ball are aliens and not even humans, canonically, so while that’s the least important point I can make, still, it shows how little thought went into this entire ordeal.


The repercussion: After a day of people begging Twitch to pull the tweet and learn from their mistake, they finally deleted it. But if we're going to keep running into this same problem for any holiday or month honoring any group of people, shouldn't these companies just hire more diversely so they can stop stepping on rakes? You can Google the infamous Burger King tweet about women for International Women's Day, or a number of corporations who bungled Black History Month on social media. It shouldn't be this hard, but yet, here we are in 2023 still wondering how this stuff happens…


Jared Russo



Sunday

Kori aka @koribrackett

The character: @koribrackett, Twitter user, person who disapproves of certain age gaps

The plot: Last week, Twitter user @BancoHavinIt complained that people on the app make 22-year-olds feel weird for dating 19-year-olds — something that they argue isn’t a big deal. Another user, @koribrackett, quote-tweeted the post asking "wtf" 19-year-olds have in common with 20-year-olds — and in doing so, sparked a Twitter debate that lasted days.

She has since deleted the tweet, so here's a screenshot:

19 22 year old tweet


The repercussion: As with most lively Twitter discourse, opinions were mixed. Some people saw no issue with the age gap, while others think the three-year difference means the couple would be at vastly different stages in their lives.


Darcy Jimenez



Sunday

@Rory_Breaker_

The character: Rory Breaker, Twitter guy, not your friendly neighborhood Spider Man

The plot: Breaker, whose bio reads :"I'm not here to argue, I'm here for the funny sh—t," stayed true to their word. Breaker's convictions are strong, and that's what led their tweet about neighbors, and how it's good to not know them. "What, are we supposed to have some kind of a connection because we live closer to each other?" Breaker questioned.


The repercussion: Did Gertrude make a scene that we don't know about? Who knows. There were people who tried to reason with Breaker, while others got their jokes off.


Adwait Patil



———

Read the previous edition of our One Main Character column, which included a famous film director who doesn't like when humans think about lunch, an NYT opinion writer who's making quite the name for himself, 200 (!) canceled people chilling on a boat, a film writer who needs a new watch and an adult baby who needs to stop eating weed gummies.


Did we miss a main character from this week? Please send tips to [email protected].

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