Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
> Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it “soon”.
That's the only news or "fact" in the lede -- the content that immediately follows is boilerplate:
> The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later. Similar buttons to “like” or show appreciation of people’s status updates, pictures and videos have become a central function of every popular social media service since Facebook introduced them.
> But psychologists have suggested that they may be causing social media addiction.
"We are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now."
Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.
And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.
They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.
Done well and taken in context, it's funny?
Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example.
Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects.
Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.
1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging
2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse
3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote
3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all.
There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.
Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.
I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them...
That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
"people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion".
I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.
Yeah, I think I've seen a few of those. Nothing says constructive discussion like death threats.
> 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
The problem of online harassment is not (mainly) that the service UI becomes cumbersome to use for the victim. It's that everyone else can observe they are harassed and the victim loses control over their online presence. Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed.
There's a perspective where this is a good thing, but I think I know where you're coming from. I've seen people on the receiving end of these attacks who say they still want to know about it so they know about any tangible threats.
I think the "shitstorm" dynamics are more complex and there are different motivations for people to take part in one. E.g., it could be simple venting, virtue singalling to peers in your brigade or you sharing the tweet to others in your circle - nothing that needs any perticipation by the original author.
In extreme cases, an author might not realize what is going on until they find outraged articles about themselves in the news.
See the comparable problem of cyberbullying for an example. There, it's often completely irrelevant whether or not a victim knows about the messages that are written about them. Indeed, they can be bullied on online platforms where they don't even have an account. All that is required is for participants in the bullying to know how to access the messages.
Of course, harrassing PMs are a different issue. Here, you can be sure the messages are exclusively directed towards the author and the harm is being done by having the author read them. Blocking those kind of messages would stop the bullying action itself and could work. But then again, this is not so much different from the oldfashioned blocking we already have.
But this is probably me trying to salvage twitter for the non-toxic purposes and its probably a losing battle. The fact that what you propose is necessary is a terrible state of affairs.
I just wish someone else would come along and eat their lunch already.
A few Tweets are quoted to give the impression of widespread outrage.
Tweet embedding is a negative value feature that’s helping to corrode regular journalism, and that seems to be of very limited value.
Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest.
Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :)
Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously.
How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it.
Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)
(in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)
Or you can do it en masse in the browser: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitte...
I prefer individual control over central control. Maybe they should make the "Turn off Rewteets" feature more visible.
"You're holding it wrong."
I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.
It might be the hint that maybe sometimes people are at least somewhat responsible for their problems.
If you don't want the "like" button on Twitter, you're not allowed to press the "downvote" button on HN.
Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.
It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
Then unfollow the guy. Seriously, it's that simple. You have the power to curate your own experience, that's my point.
> It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative.
Unfollow
I can't tell you how to cure your favorite subcultures of their bullshit, I'm telling you how to have a pleasant experience on Twitter. If that means your Twitter timeline becomes emptied, you'll have to find new people to follow.
> We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
No, that's actually just what your slice of "society" is like. Mine isn't like that, because I curate it not to be like that.
Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.
I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.
I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.
I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.
What if HN didn’t show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on invisible votes? I wonder if a system that’s more simple like that would carry over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?
Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts per day.
The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.
Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.
Twitter is full of hatred. People who disagree with you will threaten you and try to publicly shame you. Someone takes something out of context, then shares it with hundreds/thousands of other like-minded people and attempts to get them all to target you.
Facebook is full of ignorance. Doesn't matter what you say, some ill informed person will speak over you and refute your points. FB is absolutely the worst for this. The public posts about controversial issues is loaded with ignorant people spouting nonsense over others.
Reddit is full of downvote and report abusers. If someone disagrees with you, they and their friends will downvote your comment until it collapses due to the negative vote threshold. The more extremist ones will report every single thing you say and attempt to get you banned.
These sites also have no recourse for abuse. Once you are banned, it is next to impossible to get it overturned.
Media Preview: Off
Reduced Motion: On
Video Autoplay: Never
Increased Contrast: On
I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.
Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.
YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted, but I feel it's still an improvement.
And maybe the most important thing of all. The vast majority of people do not check out new threads. So you get a very artificial selection of topics that end up making it onto the front page, since it's selected by the tiny minority that do view and vote upon the new topics.
I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.
Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.
1. I don't have time to type out an appropriately nuanced comment, and an un-nuanced comment is hardly better qualified than a driveby downvote.
2. No matter the quality of my explanatory comment, it will only be a target for partisan downvoters. I don't care much for my karma, but I do care for my time and I don't want to waste it so trolls can give my view an air of illegitimacy.
Besides, while it is annoying to be downvoted anonymously, no one owes me an explanation. It's a courtesy at best, and any attempt to regulate it will be defeated by insincere feedback.
Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...
It happens when you've struck a nerve but nobody wants to try and refute you because engaging in debate comes with a risk of you actually being right and them actually being wrong and some part of their ideology hinges on the correctness of whatever you're challenging.
"Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness of meaning, and at the same time, conversely, the means of communication in the direction of hasty and all-flooding distribution have probably reached their maximum, for what is more hastily circulated than gossip?"
Interesting. Where did you get the quote from? I might add it my reading list :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Self-Examination
From this chapter:
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/zur-selbstprufung-der-gegen...
Couldn't immediately find an English version of the text.
"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." - Soren Kierkegaard
I have 300ish followers. I’ll spend 5 minutes or so crafting a Tweet. If it gets one or two likes, that’s positive reinforcement, it feels worth my time.
It’s rare I’ll get replies unless I said something someone else vehemently disagrees with. So you’re leaving all my reasons not to use the platform, while removing my reasons to use it.
So now best case scenario is a retweet? Meh. This feels like a huge miss-step from a company that doesn’t understand why people use their platform. Honestly, this seems like how you kill a platform.
*edit... Originally said 300.
No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags, emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.)
People always underestimate the extent to which UI design and content structure drive communication tone. Sure, just because some website is messy doesn't mean it will immediate make everyone a jerk, but this stuff has cumulative effect. As a way of example: try to write a long paper letter to someone by hand. You will immediately see how that changes the way you think.
Also, people should check out Jaron Lanier's talks on why everyone should delete their social media accounts. He doesn't talk about UI, but he makes some great points about economic incentives, behaviorism and emergent properties of ad-driven online economies.
I enjoy and have learned more from the discussions on HN than on any other platform. But what Twitter lacks in quality it more than makes up for in diversity and quantity. There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk to randos in Indiana and India all in the same thread. As crappy as the discussions can get, I have a hard time imagining how much better any such service could be without making tradeoffs on audience and ease of engagement. Mastodon, for example, seems to have limited scope and scale inextricable in its design. Which is not to say that that makes it a worser service -- just one that is inherently different from Twitter's model.
280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty.
> There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk
In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an anthill.
If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions online.
I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.
You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress.
The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.
On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over Tesla because he was on Twitter.
But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in their respective categories.
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...
Edit: I was thinking of favorites. I used favorites as bookmarks, so I got it mixed up.
(I think making Favorites/Likes act like retweets was a terrible idea - thankfully I never saw them in third-party apps, but it made the website a horrible experience when you see what the people you follow were liking.)
I wonder when they're going to start testing this and what the results are. I hope they share what they learn, this could be an interesting experiment given how core a part of Twitter the like/favorite button has always been!
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on-twi...
Twitter works fine for it's original purpose, follow a few people and wanting to know what they post. You have to tweak a few settings:
• Disable "Timeline: Show the best Tweets first" (in "Account")
• disable "Quality filter" (in "Notifications")
• "Turn off retweets" for people you follow who tweet interesting stuff but retweet garbage
• stop following people who tweet more than a few times a week (nobody has that much interesting stuff to say!)It's like a curation engine where you can manually select curation sources.
That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception ;-)
Thinking back it coincides somewhere around the same time HN improved their mobile viewing experience. Unsure if it's related but does feel HN reached some wider audience, or at least has a broader acceptance of varying levels of quality for comments.
Then most people need better education (and not just vocational training).
The amount of things discussed in philosophy and science journals which people aren't aware of is mind-boggling, to the point where every argument online takes place not taking into account any research and resorting to pure speculation and fans of each speculative hypothesis (stated as fact of course) up/downvoting. This happens on Reddit and HN despite it being more visible on Twitter and such. But even I don't have the time to look up the research on any given topic I want to care about.
For some things, absolutely (after all 99% on the internet is crap). But if one can never do it, but can, e.g. spend 3 hours checking celebrity gossip, then there's a problem!
Reading things thoroughly takes time, and time is money. Scientists are paid to read the current literature on their field. Government and corporate analysts are paid to collect data and provide synthetic memos to executives. Journalists are paid to read sources as a background to their story. If you want me to read your wall of text, you either have to convince me that you are worth reading (through your reputation) or pay me to do it.
HN is indeed an exception in that I find the site to be a kind of guarantee that most of users are well-versed in tech topics and thus have something interesting to say. In that sense the whole website provides a reputation to its users. Twitter has no such guarantee.
Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing.
The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.
We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.
Also, even mathematical proofs are cumbersome to state in a purely formal way. Moreover, many of our arguments hinge more on things like accuracy of assumptions, informal inferences, disagreement on "axioms" and goals, etc, not on formal validity of arguments.
1. post something where you can understand what they mean but they didn't spend the time (not that you should have to) to refine the point and people are pedantic
2. post something so absurd that has no basis in reality.
I agree that the end result is screaming at each other but nobody is on Twitter to engage in debates in the first place. Nobody can present a valid discussion that was hampered in any serious way by twitter's character limit.
And I have seen many insightful discussions on Twitter. Not everything has to page long retorts.
I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing. That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong. What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting, which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
For example, I'll reformat above text to fit into 280 character buckets, which actually won't even be a good aproximation of what I would have written on Twitter, since I refelected on the text, restructuring it and editing it through out. Here it goes:
> In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication.
> Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.
> I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing.
> That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong.
> What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting...
> ... which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
By reading that, you can tell that the rhythm of the text doesn't match the rhythm of the divisions. The text is too wordy for the constraints, sentences too long. Last sentence had to be cut into two paragraphs. It's almost giving you indigestion, a feeling like you're taking too large bites too fast.
I had a middle-of-the-road idea in this area too, which is to replace the number with the magnitude. So you still get the feedback from the vanity metric, but it happens with logarithmic decay.
A more detailed write-up (and repo for the plugin) for those interested: https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity-count...
Things that get people clicking and active is what makes the money and so it's what gets optimized for.
Distinguishing "quality" content from "engaging" content does not sound like a simple problem at all. It sounds like one that involves a whole lot of heuristics and opinion.
If it were easy, "clickbait" wouldn't be a thing.
I would say it is our own human inability to separate "engaging" from "quality" that causes this mess.
Account with huge number of followers that can block counter accounts could create an echo chamber, which is rather poisonous to a healthy debate.
That being said, I don't think twitter should be used as an debate platform, and there are some online tools trying to solve the problem already, like Kialo. They perhaps are not good enough, but still better than twitter.
> "As we've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now."
Intuitively I can't imagine twitter's numbers are going to fare well if they're handing out a third of the dopamine hits that they were previously.
If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.
I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system because of the said biased 'judges' - removing the like functionality doesn't seem like an improvement though.
Most people couldn’t make a coherent argument even if you gave them 100,000 words.
I have been using "favourite"/"like", like a bookmark, so am I going to lose all those now?
I mean how many times getting downvotes taught you how to behave on HN?
Long time ago I once posted a joke; it was good and funny joke even somewhat related to subject. I got downvoted into oblivion. I scratched my head for a while but then realized I do the same thing - even if I chuckle at someones good joke, I cast my vote of thumb down to remind them in order to keep quality engagement on HN, don't post jokes! I eventually figured out it was a venue thing. You may be the funniest guy in the word, but if you go to church people expect you to remain in silence and/or pray, not make jokes.
Twitter used to be really great and then few months ago I just gave up on it. I follow few people that spew hate rhetoric. I watched them posting their stuff about Clinton's emails over and over again. Sometimes getting stupid answers, sometimes being ignored and sometimes actually seeing people putting time and effort to answer and explain. These individuals were not interested in your response! They were there just to post their rhetoric like a contest who scream louder in empty echo chamber! I know that HN downvote button would help cleanse Twitter because with few thousands posts per second, obviously nobody will decide manually how valuable the tweet is.
Being downvoted on Twitter would mean first your posting frequency goes down. Then it could mean your post is sliced to 210 char (half of original 420). Finally you could be jailed automatically for 3/7/14/31 days. I mean there is so many ideas to get folks post quality content or GTFO that its surprise management allowed Twitter to slide this low. I am sure I am not the only one who gave up on Twitter, or perhaps to Twitter bottom line (ad $), it doesn't even matter.
The format itself encourages people to gloss over nuance, ignore complexity, and simply declare a position which anyone who disagrees is at least wrong and very possibly evil, depending on the topic.
Twitter is a great platform for shooting the shit, rapidly conveying breaking news, and snappy one-liners. It's actively bad for any kind of in-depth analysis. Twitter should focus on improving the patform's natural strengths, not trying to make it into something it can only ever fail at.
When all you have to do is spend 10 minutes on Twitter to realize it's full of political bots, crypto scam bots, humans with short fuses, and celebrities shilling their snake oil products.
Though Twitter added bookmarking feature, it is somehow useless for me as I can't undo this bookmarking operation for individual tweet but I can simply unlike a tweet.
Personally I think Twitter is just not suitable for debating. I mean you can't articulate your view in 280 charscters. Facebook is better suited for this.
It'd be nice if Twitter could reconcile it's shitty RSS replacement and crazy-drunken-uncle-shouting-into-the-void halves into something coherent.
It's found to the right of the heart button.
P.s: I’m the founder of Kozmos, but honestly would promote any bookmarking service over Twitter features.
I'm not a huge fan of Twitter, so I'll admit bias, but 140/280 characters really isn't enough to construct a proper argument, but it's the exact space to come up with some some witty truism. I seriously doubt that the "likes" were the problem.
Please remove retweet count as well.
Maybe Twitter can become a social network without herd mentality.
And then facebook(incl. instagram) can also remove their 'reaction emojis'
On Twitter, I regularely see accounts with tens of thousands of followers. Yet their tweets get less then 10 likes. So a like to follower ratio of 0.1% or so.
On Instagram the situation is pretty different. Like to Follower ratio is more in the 1% range.
What is the reason for this difference?
At this point I have 0 faith that Twitter can or wants to clean up the mess they’ve made. It’s been obvious for years that Twitter is trending in a dark way, yet it seems like corporate likes to pretend that they’re back in the happy early days.
I’ve got hundreds of links to side projects, tips, advice, and inspiration stored in there. Hopefully they give us some warning before it happens so I can scrape them all.
Hey Twitter, it's not bad to give users a little choice.
/edit spelling
Just quit it already.
But as well as when they started merging liked posts into the content feed on the main apps, it did remove the critical thing if it being an option for feedback to a post, without sharing the content to your own timeline (a retweet).
I don't understand any logic behind this change at all, and if there is, there's a paywall. But twitter is for everything, not just politics. If you're using politics to drive your platform, it's a shitshow for anyone else that uses the platform for more recreational purposes
Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.
Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of appreciation. I do that a lot.
I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone who actually tweets though.
If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion. Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.
If you share to an empty audience, it will still be added to the share count.
Sigh, I would be losing a lot of my book marks.
Then quality goes out the window when anybody from the mob can jump into your thread at any point, quibbling with words, accusing you of being Hitler, etc.
To have meaningful debate, you also need people who are seeking truth and are open to having their minds changed. Twitter (or modern politics in general) does not incentivize changing your mind, since anyone can screenshot some old Tweet, and now you're a flip-flopper. As if you're expected to emerge onto social media with a fully-formed worldview.
But it's not like politics has ever been a thoughtful, measured process. There are no good ol' days. The ballot box is a proxy for the musket and bayonet. When you vote, you are literally making an attempt to force the other half of society to do what you want. Life, liberty, and property are on the line, so politics will never be anything but conflict.
If you want to be downvoted to oblivion on HN, just try pointing out potential moral issues with a new technology.
"USERS: we love twitter but it has problems
TWITTER: great we'll fix them
USERS: do you want to know what they are
TWITTER: absolutely not
USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product
TWITTER: likes are now florps
USERS: what
TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"
(The irony is that likes used to have a clear, simple use: bookmark something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.
Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)
The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enough.
Most of your users won't care. They'll enjoy the content. Someone chimes in that the sub or forum is no longer pure. The content is similar, but it's off-topic. The board is going to devolve into just pics of dogs (which is a legitimate concern). Other people defend that the board needs content, and that computer glasses and a scooter is similar enough to be inclusive. So where do you plant you flag? Will there be a zero-tolerance policy for anything that isn't a dog wearing sunglasses riding a skateboard (OMG mods are literally Nazis!!!), do you allow users to flag posts for review on a case-by-case basis (need more mods), or do you relax the content restriction (this board is trash since it lost its focus!)?
Twitter has no focused topic. The platform is for anyone to communicate whatever they want within reason. With disparate cultures than span every corner of the globe, how do you stop the problem from existing in the first place? Not everyone has the tolerance for scathing, brutal honesty. How do you draw the line between that and bullying? How do you differentiate between well-intended people who are misinformed and people spouting propaganda? I don't have the answer, but my time moderating forums about topics that have no impact on society has taught me that it's pretty much impossible to create a perfect platform that appeases everyone.
I actually have! I definitely don't think there's currently a good solution to this problem. But removing likes is ridiculous, too!
There's a furry eSports person (https://twitter.com/SonicFox5000) who likes a lot of gay furry porn on his main account. Many people were surprised when Twitter started doing this.
Really 90% of twitter for me is either liking great art or getting depressed by the news/US politics. Take away the art and twitter gets a lot less appealing.
I follow several thousand users so I guess the timeline algorithm doesn't bother showing me Liked activity. However, I do see "[some user] and 5 others liked this tweet" when I do a search for tweets, and I find that note to be more helpful than not, to be honest.
My curated collection of "likes" is one of my most valued possessions. 1000+ tweets that each made me laugh or smile or think in a powerful enough and unique enough way that I needed to save it. And I've spent a lot of time enjoying them after the fact. I wrote a slack command to show me a random one whenever I need to be picked up.
Granted, those 1000 tweets came buried in a lot of noise, but the diamonds on Twitter make it not only worthwhile but by far my favorite social network or online experience.
Of course, that's despite everything Twitter has done in the last several years and not because of it. Like a lot of Google products it's attracted that air of frequently making you believe they must not actually use it themselves.
Please don't do that. Repetition lowers the signal/noise ratio of conversation and the last thing we need here is people repeating the same things over and over.
On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and follow your friends. They shouldn't screw it just to cater to a certain part of their user base.