“Did We Create This Monster?” How Twitter Turned Toxic
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Github isn't toxic. Dreamwidth isn't toxic.
The orientation towards microblogging has a lot to do with the toxicity.
There's defo some toxicity on github.
Of course this wouldn't stop direct attacks or people talking indirectly about other people, but at least it would stop randos from sealioning.
Speaking of which, your papers please.
Auto-moderation is a useful start, but strong community moderation is built on empathy and soft skills, which for the moment is still best handled by people.
Companies can't tell users, "we're forcing you to use your real names so we can conspire with other companies to track you wherever you go against your knowledge", so they say it's to encourage better behavior.
Probably not. Often time people are just as terrible in person and social media just gives them more reach.
"What if filters were used to prevent the most egregious words of hatred?"
It's too easy to come up with new (((slurs))) to get around such censorship but still spread the same message.
"Is it at all possible to have something like twitter that isn't as toxic, given the right features?"
Social media often makes people more toxic by exposing them more directly to the opinions of others and they find that intolerable. A lot of the time, the nuances of certain kinds speech are different in different communities and those nuances are lost on social media and people become more toxic as a result.
I suspect that carefully considered features could reduce toxicity of discussion, but I don't think that it is just a matter of features. Ultimately it's a people problem and people cannot just be automated around.
Sounds like life in general. I think People restrain themselves more than we realize. Especially when there are consequences for actioning out. Remove those and things go south quick.
The last 100 years of humanity has had some moments that make the internet look pretty caring.
I mean, we're talking hundreds of millions of killings, plus untold numbers of rape and kidnappings across every convenient.
Hobbes would have gotten a kick out of the internet to be sure. It's about closest to the mythical 'state of nature' we're ever likely to observe.
The parallel with real life abuse has to end.
People are selfish and therefore very prone to being evil.
Being bad online is expected.
Experiences may differ, but having grown up in the wild west of the internet this is normal to me and therefore I just don't get how it could stress someone out all that much or why people would voluntarily expose themselves like that.
Of course over the years I have also learned to wear many hats and not stick my real life identity to everything. Data hygiene is important for your sanity.
In that case of twitter I have 3 different accounts. One just for following artists where I harvest their images. One for occasionally having a conversation about tech things and one for video games. None of them are directly associated with my real identity, although with some sleuthing you could notice to which github account my tech one corresponds.
So, you don't have close friends of business contacts on Twitter, but you wonder why you don't feel stress when twitter is used to attack you? I think if you were a more serious user, you would feel the pinch more when the network gets hostile.
Most people didn't grow up in the wild west of the internet. Most people carry their intuitions about social interaction over from the real world. Tech people seem to chronically underestimate just how monumentally ill-prepared society was for the ubiquity of smartphones and always-on communication.
It is designed and implemented to breed toxicity. It is optimized for engagement, but people don't just engage when they are happy and want to share the joy they also engage when they are angry, upset, want to argue and debate. So they end up arguing in 140 character short quips and sarcastic remarks. Which gets other people angry and they respond with more short sarcastic remarks. How often has anyone said in such an exchange "Oh your witty remark and calling me an fucking idiot gave me pause, I went back, reevaluated my position and now I agree with you".
But engagement goes up, and why bother removing bots, they just add more activity and users. "Oh look we have 330M active monthly users" they can say to the shareholders. Buy more shares!
There is no mention how they went to RT, a Russian state propaganda outlet and offered them deals and access to US voters ahead of the 2016 election. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/26/twitter-b... . Forgot what Twitter's response was, something like "we do not comment on private pitch decks". Which pretty much acknowledges it. So they breed and encourage toxicity then turn around and blast PR how they want more civility and are protecting democracy.
For example:
> Internally, Costolo complained that the “abuse economics” were “backward.” It took just seconds to create an account to harass someone, but reporting that abuse required filling out a time-consuming form.
And of course the larger story of a vigilante censor being blocked. Twitter doesn't want outside forces policing it, but that means it has to police itself, which it has failed to do at critical moments.
The whole thing seems to set the tone for the sort of garbage that they talk about wanting to eliminate.
Is it feasible for one person to be an effective CEO of two companies at the same time? Particular ones that are at the stages Twitter and Square are at?
You can be effective if both startups are in fundraising mode: you’ll be having a lot of the same conversations with the same people. That’s a relationship game.
But I also think it was the move towards threads and conversations. For a few years Twitter was mostly one directional . You would post your status, similar to how you would update your instant messaging away status. Twitter became a way to follow everyone's posts. Threads didn't exist and replying was not built in.
After these two changes the company became blind drunk with growth and celebrity. Oprah moment.
Somebody could make an echo chamber argument at me I guess, but I should be allowed to filter out absolute falsehoods without being called "unfair and unbalanced."
These are sacrifices necessary in order to live in a free society.
You can't just take freedom of speech from the people you don't like to listen to; you would be taking it away from everyone.
Good
Since most people have nothing significant to say (notable discovery) they signal which ever way they can. So they dig up nonsense molehills and let their friends build it into a mountain.
Oh, look, this restaurant is sourcing from this place that my friend just told me secretly underpays their workers-- most foul. Don't patronize the restaurant, boycott! (No, I didn't confirm, I don't know if it's true, but boycott , for justice NAU!!! (Oh I feel a righteous human now))
My take away is that, after ten years, we can say that Facebook and Twitter have a negative impact on contemporary society.
What are the evidences for "People are generally good"?
Human nature is really shapeable — and we (as a former product manager in this space) designed algorithms and product experiences to maximize certain outcomes that benefit social network bottom lines. Regardless of how good or bad human nature is, the algorithms prize engagement however they can get it — I personally believe it surfaces a certain side of humanity, and pushes people in a certain direction.
If you're a news editor, you actually have a choice to sensationalize all day because it maximizes short-term profits. After bad things happened (see yellow journalism, the newspaper circulation wars) — newspapers did cut back a fair bit. (We can debate whether that was the risk of regulation, or their own respect for the role they had)
This clearly isn't the social networks' fault alone, but their product choices do partially influence on how we all behave. On HN, you hear a lot of anger at journalists for being so click-baity, and the sad part is that every incentive many journalists face encourages this (from user behavior to profit)
There are tons of examples how bad incentives can warp how people behave, far beyond "humanity is good" or "humanity is bad". For example, see Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil or the Stanford Prison Experiment. More regularly, see architecture, urban planning, or product management in the Valley, as disciplines that think deeply about the outcomes they want to encourage.
A more accurate statement I would say is: humanity has certain predilections, and design choices can influence these dramatically.
(And now I will shill my media literacy for engineers guide — contributions welcome: https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer )
> “For the most part I found them rather laughable and easily ignored,” he says.
'Twitter, Reddit, and Conway's Law'
https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/social-media-architect...
All the big social networks exist to serve advertisers. They sell users attention to marketers. This means that their profit is directly dependent on how much attention they can harvest. So the systems that emerge (consciously or not) propagate attention grabbing content. This means that trolling and toxicity which exist to get a reaction get systematically supported. It also means that the novel and affirming fake news get magnified. It also means that the lowest common denominator cruelty does best (hey Logan Paul and your 'prankster' cadre).
None of this changes if you want tech and services paid for by your attention and mind-share. If users actually become customers then the question becomes what might they spend money on, not just what can we get them to pay attention to. And that can lead to much more sophisticated behavior. Behavior that actually reflects our conscious choices as opposed to subconscious impulses.
Check out oalrus.com for my proposal to implement something like that.
I'd say the trend of articles on news sites using hyperbole and inflammatory language in every other headline to bait people into clicking is a far more serious issue. People on twitter do as they please - journalists need a hard look in the mirror before throwing stones at entire platforms.
Discussion is of high quality as long as it remains aligned, which is true 99% of the time.
I would re-characterize it as "some Reddit subreddits are far worse" - because your experience can vary widely. All the subreddits I subscribe to (hobby and interest related, not news/politics) are actually self-policed very well. I tend to think the toxic subreddits are actually in the minority even though they get all the attention.
I find Reddit to be pretty good in general. All the subreddits I subscribe to (none are political or hot topics, they're all around my hobbies and interests, etc) are pretty civil. I am sure there are toxic subreddits, but my Reddit feed is higher quality than my Facebook feed by a mile, and the discussions might have a few corny jokes, but they're generally fine.
Abstracting all communication as "speech" and therefore "free speech" and therefore "censorship" means not differentiating between discussing local traffic policy with a group of informed people, and having everyone listen to the loud smelly drunk who sat down at your table to tell jokes about negroes.
When a small number of trolls can derail a conversation, you get denial-of-service attacks against civil discourse and democracy.
> having everyone listen to the loud smelly drunk who sat down at your table to tell jokes about negroes
For example, the article talks about a mismatch between moderation tools and trolling:
> Internally, Costolo complained that the “abuse economics” were “backward.” It took just seconds to create an account to harass someone, but reporting that abuse required filling out a time-consuming form.
The best forums I've ever been on were those where there were no ratings whatsoever, a linear structure of discussion, and that allowed any range of opinions as long as they were not in the aforementioned groups.
Spam is spam. If they were actually spamming then Twitter had every right and obligation to shut their operation down. Spamming for a good cause does not make it right.
In general, Joe jobbing against race only works against racists. Who cares about racists anyway?
Look at any controversial tweet these days and the reply thread is full of inflammatory comments from users with numeric usernames (@Joe154354), blurry photos (that can't be reverse image searched) and that seem to ONLY post about political topics and retweet similar voices. Heuristically they are highly likely to be bots or provocateurs but it's hard to prove as Twitter doesn't expose much information.
Twitter has a serious bot/troll problem that they are choosing to ignore, and it is making the discourse on there toxic and untrustworthy. I find myself avoiding the platform these days as it just leaves me feeling stressed and sad.
Well it shouldn't be on an anonymous forum. The only things that count in such a environment are ideas. Only the first one counts. The same ideas over and over again just count as a poor signal to noise ratio (which would be the root problem).
I suspect that we are in some sort of eternal september[1] phase here where people are being exposed to such environments for the first time. If this sort of thing is going to be a social problem perhaps we need to teach anonymous forums in school.
I personally have no interest in Twitter because I have passed the phase in my life where such a thing would be interesting. That doesn't mean that I think it is worthless but it seems that there are people who are taking it more seriously than it deserves.