A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste of time.
I think adding links to user profiles might be a good addition if I wanted to see a all of a specific users tweets but I rarely do.
This looks really cool. I wish they were flexible about organizing our feed.
I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.
But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.
I follow my local (city) government, the NWS for weather, and Raymond Hettinger.
What they're probably interested in is getting news/thoughts about a handful of topics, which would be akin to following a few subreddits or forums.
But the way Twitter and Facebook are set-up is that you follow people, not topics. And people tend to talk about all sorts of topics on a given day, thus the "noise."
It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing.
Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).
and now even HN is :p
For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. Of course, that was the time before sites like Buzzfeed/Upworthy and the general expansion of a culture of writing articles specifically for reshare virality.
There was a clever RSS reader that worked on this principle. Sadly, it is no longer being developed.
I follow about a hundred or so and I get 300-400 items per day. I use lists for different topics but following one of the lists takes too much time.
In addition to this, nobody stays on topic. The political climate is so intense that the reactions to it permeate everything.
The signal to noise ratio is becoming unacceptable and I’m not aware of any tools to improve it.
For one, if I were to mute opinions that I disagreed with, I feel like I would be in effect turning a blind eye to the fact that people have these opinions. I don't see any value in this; people all over the world have all sorts of different opinions, and deluding myself into believing that people who disagree with me effectively don't exist seems... wrong, morally, at least to me. I specifically follow individuals (both public figures and not) whose opinions (political and otherwise) don't align with my own. I _want_ to see thoughts that aren't just identical to the ones already floating around in my head!
Also, I personally believe that associating emotions with words and phrases in the minds of the populace so strongly as to cause one to either react with outrage or reach for a digital mute/hide button, is one of the strongest weapons of social destruction today. This is a means of socially engineering people's reactions to specific ideas, conditioning them on a mass scale to be unable to use logic and reason as their emotions short-circuit any such thinking. Since mid-2016 I have gone to great lengths to refrain from becoming "outraged" by outrage-bait news and social media posts, and I've found that it's increased my personal happiness and outlook on life considerably, especially as the mass and social media ramp up their production of nigh-constant outrage fuel, and everyone seems to want to make _everything_ political.
The trick is that I don't treat Twitter as a newscast but as a stream of interesting thoughts to sample from when I have free time. I do keep a secret list of people who use Twitter to put out original work that I'll check from time to time but mostly I find that my general timeline has most of the interesting tweets in it anyway, because of how Twitter curates the top of it -- with the What-You-Might-Have-Missed, even if you have your timeline in chrono order.
I know a few hundred people in real life but I don't feel a need to call them all up every single day. Ditto for Twitter. I can follow a wide range of people and dip in and out of it, enjoy the variety, and move on. I'd want to read everyone's every tweet as little as I'd want to know every one of my acquaintance's thoughts every day..
Do you read every HN post? Much less should you feel the need to read every tweet.
I ended up with the following lists that I can now browse separately for several disparate interests of mine:
Founders / CEOs
Game Dev
Apple
AR / VR
Iowa (local people I follow from where I'm from)Whenever I'd add someone, I picked which group or groups they fell into. I could create as many or as few groups as I wanted and then I could view posts and threads based on which "circle" they were in.
I'd be more inclined to use Twitter or any service that made this kind of sorting this flexible and useful.
I follow ~500 people, but I'm very selective by only following people who know better than to re/tweet wrong, irrelevant, or obvious stuff. This way, Twitter works great for me as first-hand news, rather than the usual spin cyclone.
(I also use Twitter for Mac, so no promoted tweets, random order, etc).
Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. People seem to use retweets more sparingly (and may even think if followers are interested before retweeting) than likes. So now my feed is full of cat pictures and memes users have liked instead of just the content I really subscribed for.
At this point what is the difference between "like" and "retweet"?
... including those annoying favourites-as-retweets (.tweet-has-context:not([data-retweeter])). It really grates that they introduced that without allowing you to mute that like RT's, or a way to stop your own tweets showing up like that; and surprising that the feature survived after Ted Cruz's nsfw 'like' showed up that way last year.
I rarely go on Twitter but I've noticed that the "X liked this" are usually the worst of all on my newsfeed.
But there's a fix for this: click on the "..." menu -> "I don't like this tweet" on a few of them, and then you shouldn't see any more of the "X liked this tweet"
The only one I see now are "X and Y liked this tweet from Z" but in that case I follow both X, Y, and Z.
This has improved the quality of the feed dramatically.
And working just as the cognitive scientists designed.
Tim Wu, danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Robert McChesney, Jonathan Albright, Tristan Harris, and others are among those critics. Several have direct experience with TwitFaceGoogTube et al.
Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs.
I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics!
imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.
Her explanation: https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/963594118747361281
The original tweet: https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/3760544030
There was plenty else that Norton tweeted that was problematic (including another time that she used the n-word in a debate to rhetorically quip that "terrorist" was an equally stupid word), but I was struck at how easy it was to misread those pre-official-RT tweets as actual original tweets from the retweeter. And many of the people dragging Norton over that tweet may not have been around back in 2009.
[edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.]
Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.
Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so, or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are reposted retweets. How does it look for you?
Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the amplification of the network effect.
Most of my mastodon feed is posts, a retweet(boost) is probably one in 50 on a normal day, spiking to maybe one in 10.
It might be a cultural problem on twitter (maybe some mastodon communities have similar problems...)
I checked the source [0] and that does indeed use ß, so I was wrong to blame the author of the piece. I now blame Jonah Peretti.
[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1158576/pages/uf-...
"No, the article doesn't mix up anything", perhaps?
You seem annoyed that the original creator of the formula used a symbol that you wouldn't have expected. So that's your beef. Not with this article, or any assumptions of "mixing up."
As for why the original creator used "ß", I don't know, but perhaps it related to the "S" in sharability. Or he's not a mathematician and he liked the look.
[0]https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4c655d457f8b9a711c7d0...
[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/jonah-perettis-awesome-viral-...
It also highlights these tweets when displayed, so it's a bit more obvious when your timeline consists of someone else's retweet spree or Twitter's algorithm.
[1] https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-min...
I myself have begun to think that a higher standard of friendship is needed in social media. Something like Twitter, where you can follow anyone unless they actively block you, makes more sense where engagement is limited, like how selecting a TV channel to watch is largely a one-way experience.
I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Snapchat may be on to something here, as you actually have to know the person exists before you can add them.
I don't know exactly what the answer is - ask compatibility questions, quiz the user about their history, analyze their current social networks for positive engagement - but I'm extremely curious about the possibility of a social network that purposely limits its own network effects.
Like Facebook?
There is no one type of "social network" out there.
The solution is for people to learn how to use various social networks effectively. Facebook is for keeping some sort of connection with people you know or once knew. Twitter is for content, be it about activism or entertainment. Instagram is for people to boost each other's self esteem so they collectively feel better, at least for some time.
For personal connections, what we really need are small, immutable communities like a small town or a school class. People who talk to each other on a daily basis. This is the only way humans are accustomed to live and judge their own worth and the progress they make.
This effect can best be observed on Instagram. By wiring very carefully curated moments of a top percentage of millions of people to our brains, we're only making ourselves feel worthless and put ourselves under enormous mental stress.
A lot of this era speaks about equality. As if everything should be flat and free to go in and out. But I very often feels that only "hills" matters. People overcome them when they do want to perceive what's at the top, and often make something of it. Instead of just wandering around without efforts or care.
I wonder if other people feel like this about this flat vs hills thing (sorry for that very badly name analogy)
It's highly interactive, especially with IRL channels, and the options for interaction are following, subscribing (which is following but with a $$ donation per month + perks), and chat.
Many streamers have links in their chats automatically blocked, and there's a good variety between small streamers with sane chats and streamers with hundreds of thousands of viewers who's chat is much more similar to Twitter's reactionary dynamic.
I could totally see that becoming kinda gamified, the objective being to collect as many of your friends' on it (by actually physically meeting them) as possible (like Pokemon Go, lol)
This way you're fairly certain that you're only interacting with your close neighbors.
if you also want to do this, here's a small hacky tool I made that uses the Twitter API to turn of retweets for people you follow. http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me
Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part of the experience.
What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between "like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it alive.
It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which is a social desert.
I'd report your comment to the moderators but I don't know how.
While it could be that (I give it a chance of 10%), there's a more likely explanation: the parent just didn't read the post or skimmed through it, so they don't know whether the author "clearly identifies as "he".
They just respond to the headline "retweets are trash" with their opinions on retweets, and used "xir" to play it safe regarding whoever the author might be.
Many people (many have said so in HN discussions) don't read TFA, or don't read the whole FA, and hardly care enough to read bylines and who the author is, etc. They just come straight to the comments, and discuss the topic as a subject they have an opinion about, not based on what TFA says.
Let's not have a pronoun flamewar please. Everyone just resist.
The guidelines that say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says" and "Don't feed egregious comments by replying" combine to give good guidance here.
Hackernews too has a culture of outrage, at times. Some articles stay on the frontpage for an entire day with very active comment sections. Most of the time outrage (though sometime the joy of a productive discussion).
Mastodon also seems to have less of a problem with retweeting (called boosting in masto), users seem to prefer their own content and boost only a few toots (though also from experience, less active users tend to boost more, me included a few times a week).
A stream of links upvoted by many people. No retweeting happens, which is why you don't see the same link every time someone votes it, only when someone resubmits it (after months or years usually).
The empty-state is a big problem for the onboarding of new users on social platforms, especially less personal ones.
I don't think my Twitter account will make it to the end of 2018.
For your purposes twitter might be truly unfit...
While it may have that going for it, wasn't Instagram recently considered the worst social media app for mental health? https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social...
I'm not convinced that dampening self-promotion and discouraging reposting are sufficient conditions for considering one platform to be better than the other.
I concur with the author that retweets are lazy noise. And quite often they reveal aspects of a person's character that I'd rather not know.
Maybe Twitter would be better if it had a technical means of enforcing only original thought. Perhaps some day in the AI future...
So the title was changed from "The Case Against Retweets" to "Retweets are Trash". Seems that the editor took the author's advice on creating sharable content - this is a pretty clear-cut appeal to emotion.
Rather surprised that The Atlantic wouldn't have been self-aware re: the title.
Take Trump's Twitter account for example. A second after he tweets, there are other of retweets. How come? it's robot that do it automatically.
Now, if I (for some obscure reason) follow that robot, I'd see all of Trump's tweets. But hang on, if that's what I want to do, I'd just follow @realDonaldTrump, right? why should I get all his tweets from a robot?
Another option is that the goal of these robots is to create artificial virality to Trump's tweets: "Oh, there are 5,023,482 retweets - this tweet (or this person) must be clever!" - which is the premise of this article. Retweets are trash.
Regardless, I find the amplification part of twitter to be the best part, although I don't really feel like I see more outrage than joy or just humor. I think it has a lot to do with who you choose to follow.
Swift's proposal is satire in order to capture the attention of readers and point it to abuses of power. One could make an allusion to poor children serving the public good and how that relates to morals and values with the spread of (negative) viral content and how tweet-babies could be better served better for consumption by the public.
I haven't thought it through much more than that, but I could see it.