Twitter’s Problem Isn’t the Like Button
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For example, this article could have been a piece on educating people on how to use Twitter correctly (follow your interests, don't respond to trolls, think critically), but instead focuses on how things are all dark and bad.
That being said, the solutions proposed here are actually sound IMO.
In social media it may not be the writing of the negative articles that is the problem, but more the reinforcement of the negative messages by algorithms designed to keep us on the platform for the longest time, and found out that feeding us disturbing, shocking stuff, conspiracy theories, etc. works best to keep us engaged.
The concept is well described in Max Stossel's Medium article "How Everyone Lost Their Mind… Except you" [0]
> "Have you noticed that everything seems like it’s falling apart? Have you noticed that the world is crumbling in exactly the way you thought it would? Have you felt recently like you’re the only one who gets it, and everyone else just doesn’t understand… like the world has been going crazy and everyone else is getting sucked in to their conspiracy theories, or fooled by mainstream media [..] Doesn’t it feel like everyone except for you, and maybe your tribe has lost their freaking minds?!"
[0] https://medium.com/@maxstossel/how-everyone-lost-their-mind-...
The unofficial motto: "Enragement is engagement!"
Actually it wouldn't surprise me if that was the official motto of some places.
I believe Twitter is a monument to the 2010's second dot com bubble, and in the future, will be looked back on like pets.com is now.
Whatever it may be, it is not pets.com
And has never shown a profit.
> Whatever it may be, it is not pets.com
What if the runways are just longer this time around?
Twitter has had profitable quarters.
https://www.recode.net/2018/2/8/16989834/twitter-q4-2018-ear...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/twitter-posts-record-100m-...
When comments stay relevant and informative, like they do here on HN, for the most part anyway. They are an asset to the social media, but as soon as they become something else they become a big problem.
Maybe they shouldn’t be disabled entirely, but instead you’d need to be approved by the poster to comment? I could see a value in giving users the control over you would allow to comment on your tweet.
It should really be called angry mob media, if anything.
I see your point of course, but I’m not really worried about creating echo chambers by giving users more ownership over their own conversations.
If you started screaming at me in the real world, I’d walk away and probably never talk to you again. That’s an echo chamber, but it’s relatively harmless, and I think the same thing would apply to almost all of social media.
I’m sure political tweeters would be terrible at it, but would it really change anything? Right now thousands of people are trolling each other in Donald Trumps twitter feed, but do you think they make a difference? I don’t, in fact I don’t think anyone has ever really been pursauded of anything in a political twitter comment section.
Mean while, the rest of us are taken hostage by the angry mob and a lack of control of what ought to be our content.
The ability to create invite only super-hashtag. Only people invited to the hashtag can reply but everyone can read.
It seems to solve many of the current Twitter problems (apart from the whole failing to ban Nazis thing) but does create extra ones around community management of who gets to make invites/kick people from the community has tags
This is what Twitter needs to get right.
A tweet from a friend is different from a tweet from a famous person. Conversations happen differently. (And it seems they have some different behaviours for these tweets)
Killing the like button won't help.
Taking abuse/harassement more seriously helps, especially things like the obvious targeted DM harassement in the article.
With the old 140 characters, or a picture meme, the best you can do is communicate like Frankenstein in the old horror movies: "Fire BAD!" "Sun good!"
Life isn't like that.
The is the same problem political ads face. If I've only got 10 seconds of your time before you click on to something else, as a writer, I'm going to have to punch you in nose. There's just no other way of using the medium. It's built into the system.
But as others here have pointed out, it's not just Twitter, and it's not related to likes by any means. (I have no idea what Twitter thinks they're doing.)
I never participated in Quora because of this same thing, and it's much more of a long-form site. For things worth knowing, things that will change your life? You have to invest some time and effort. It's a conversation. It's back and forth -- even when reading a novel. Drive-bys don't do that.
So let's look at tech overall.
Where we seem to have landed is this weird landscape where everything is either 10 seconds or 100 hours. Yes, there is some nice medium-scale content available, but even then, the creators will tell you that for the most part, people either consume in one of those two fashions. There are a lot of people purchasing long-form content that never use it. It just makes them feel better. We know this now -- and we didn't in the past -- because we instrument the hell out of everything users do.
Looking at the stats across multiple sites, I think if you really want to make people's lives better -- and not just sell stuff -- you have to acknowledge human nature and take a stand: are you going to be the 10 second guys or the 100-hour guys? I'd love to see somebody create something that somehow manages both well, with "progressive elaboration" of deep topics and avoidance of anything created that's low effort.
There are so many more important and interesting things to do than read banal and insipid posts.
I'm happy to have the day's best Tweets sifted by news channels and Jimmy Fallon.
> "First, tweets from blocked users should no longer appear in the replies to a tweet."
Being able to respond with an alternative viewpoint without having your reply made invisible is not necessary for countering echo chambers?
Even on HN and Reddit, many people use the downvote button improperly. It should be a button to downvote content that doesn't contribute to the discussion, or is spam, or morally bankrupt. It's not anything closed to this in practice. I think this is how the block feature will be used if you can just block someone to delete their replies.
I'm not a fan of removing likes from Twitter.
But that's what it's for! The conversation is over, you have no interest in receiving further death threats from this person or letting them RT you to their attack followers.
That turns it into a tool for censoring the other side of a debate, which is what the parent thread is complaining about.
On the other hand, it adds no utility to it as an anti-harassment measure - and indeed would actively undermine its usefulness at serving that goal for conscientious users, since now in order to block someone they need to be willing to obliterate any comment chain that was started by the harassing user replying to one of their Tweets. If you're not willing to do that, because there's valuable content in there that you don't think it would be right to destroy? Well, fuck you, keep getting harassed, then. By contrast, the current system would allow you to block such a user without destroying content in the process, and so wouldn't leave users facing a moral dilemma about whether to resign themselves to sustained harassment or censor a debate in which innocent third parties have participated.
If I'm misunderstanding something, I'm all ears.
Let's start how the system works at the moment: tweets that are "in reply to" another tweet are:
1) collapsed under the original by default, unless viewed by someone who follows both parties
2) shown below the original when expanded (a "thread", although not as sophisticated as USENET)
3) not shown to followers of the person who posted the tweet in their timelines (but are visible when you look at "tweets and replies"
- beyond that, if you have blocked someone, you don't see any of their tweets unless you choose to.
Bloomberg say "tweets from blocked users should no longer appear in the replies to a tweet", but of course blocked is a transitive verb: blocked by whom? If I've blocked people then when I'm looking at a thread they don't appear. At the moment, when others are looking at it, they do.
It sounds like they're suggesting a change to (2) so that if the originator of a thread has blocked a reply that's then invisible to other people viewing the thread (although not to people specifically viewing the blocked profile)? So if Alice has blocked Bob and Charlie views the thread, Charlie doesn't see the tweet unless they follow Bob?
Actually I think the downside of this is that it leaks information about Alice's blocklist! Currently it's not possible for third parties to tell if A has blocked B, and it's completely impossible for even B to tell if A has muted them.
Really the solution to harassment has to be a more functional reporting system; if Bob is actually systematically harassing Alice or posting hate speech, ban them from the platform entirely. Unfortunately there's a big problem with both false positives and false negatives.
Yeah, this is never going to work, because it is all subjective.
Your average discussion here actually seems capable of exposing multiple points of views without having to dig through the heavily down-voted comment. Similarly most people here don't seem to fall into the trap of up-voting one-liner comments that add nothing to the discussion merely because they agree with them.
There's always a blurry line between what contributes to the discussion and what does not but as far as I'm concerned it's relatively clear cut for most comments. If somebody is civil, gives arguments (or even better, sources) and doesn't appear to attempt to derail the discussion then I think it doesn't warrant being downvoted.
Actually, your comment is one that would fall on the line for me: it's negative, the "yeah, but no" structure feels a bit condescending to me and you don't actually argument your point, you're just expressing your opinion.
Yet, I don't think it warrants being down-voted, instead I up-voted other sibling comments that I deemed more interesting and wrote this reply that I hope is constructive.
I think an other thing going for HN is that there are clear posting guidelines, we're here about technology and basically "intellectual gratifying" stuff. Reddit and Twitter are social network first, news aggregator second, so people use it to like/up-vote pictures of dogs, jokes, memes etc... It's not like you're going to have a profound reply on a thread about "look, here's my Halloween costume!"
But then when you're used to reward jokes (or be rewarded for writing them) and other low-effort content it tends to contaminate the rest of the website because there's no clear limit between the "serious discussion stuff" and the "basically Facebook" stuff.
Why are things like (e.g.) gravity and (also e.g.) psychological disorders allowed to be quantified, whilst sociological concepts are simply "all subjective" and (presumably) not the stuff of science?
In actuality, we as a species are quite capable of creating theories for anything using science, and OP's categorical suggestions are not exempt merely because they deal with morality.
Perhaps if we did converge on a widely approved standard for some of these morally-interesting questions about censorship and moderation, the overall productivity and quality of our discourse on forums like Reddit and Twitter might improve.
I am not sure it's a viable approach. If we think a comment shouldn't be there in the first place, reporting it should be the way to go.
Then I think a lot of people have very loose definitions of 'morally bankrupt', in that from their POV people in their right mind shouldn't be disagreeing with them.
All in all having the upvote/downvote button as "push up"/"push down" button seem sensible to me. If the platform owner wishes people get more exposed to controversial ideas, they can tweak the effect of downvotes or adjust the thresholds of what is highlighted or pushed to users.
The problem isn't that this isn't true. The problem is that some people don't see the difference.
I would make a strong argument that twitter is a lightening rod for people who can't see a difference.
I don't continue talking to people who don't want to talk to me.
Twitter is choosing to give this feature of blocking to people, so I don't know what people are complaining about.
What is not possible (except for those with blue tick) is to block accounts with few followers or new accounts etc. So it is easy to create swarm of accounts even after being blocked.
It depends on what you think Twitter is for. I think it’s the equivalent of the public town square.
In that context I don’t think it’s appropriate.
If you start a public conversation it’s ok to walk away from it (equivalent of ignore) but it is not ok to stop certain groups you don’t like from continuing the conversation (equivalent of a real block).
In a sense you don’t own the conversation and once you have made a contribution everyone else is free to talk about your contribution.
Personally though, I think there is one thing you're missing. If you say something controversial in a public town square: a) it is transitory and people won't tend to remember it and harangue you about it years later; and b) people who don't like what you're saying only have a limited ability to harass you.
Online people can easily call flash mobs together to harass you en-masse if they don't like what you're saying. When people have more powerful tools online to harass other people, surely we deserve better tools to prevent ourselves being harassed.
Yes, those tools will be abused in some cases; but all tools can be abused. A knife is really useful for cutting meat, vegetables, and other things... It can also be really useful for slicing throats and plunging into chests for those with such a monstrous disposition. We don't stop people having knives and we shouldn't prevent people from having tools to stop other people from harassing and threatening them online.
I think this is a feature and not a bug. I don’t want to see a carefully curated representation of the past.
There are plenty of other social networks for you if that is what you want.
Or you could contribute anonymously if you want to say something transitory.
> people who don't like what you're saying only have a limited ability to harass you.
I think that’s true on Twitter as well for the most part.
What Twitter does that is different is it still allows the people you don’t like to participate in the general conversation.
Certain groups hate this and want to deny other groups the right to speak.
> surely we deserve better tools to prevent ourselves being harassed.
I think the problem is people want to benefit from the upside of having a public conversation but still want to carefully control it and I don’t think that’s healthy for society.
Again, if you are happy to forego the upside you can always contribute anonymously.
> Yes, those tools will be abused in some cases; but all tools can be abused
Exactly - Twitter is a great example.
Generally speaking, a lot of what goes on twitter does not actually goes on in person.
Sure they do - I don’t like it but it happens all the time.
Think of all the protestors who show up on campus whenever a conservative is invited to speak.
1 it's just asking for abusing a block option.
2 Imagine someone putting up a tweet supporting nazis or something and blocking everyone who doesn't agree, now it looks like majority supports that kind of stuff.
Seriously, blocks / killfiles has been a tool to prevent harassment for decades across the Internet. It’s a tool of user empowerment.
On top, they censored a website that was raising awareness among elected representatives about politically motivated large scale massacres of Sikhs, 1984SikhGenocide.org Tweets go straight to draft if you plug this URL in. How can Twitter ban this on a global scale at behest of Indian government? Then they act chummy about being receptive of both sides views. How can a minority user counter all this negativity because you get flooded nearly instantly. Also, I had to provide my phone number for enabling my account, and considering that my account details can be asked by Indian government effectively means there is a chilling effect on me. Twitter needs to take into account its minoroty users too, because there aren’t many accounts that can counter the propaganda. And the flood of tweets is just immense which then gets spread through WhatsApp. A spin agency sends message on Whatsapp, blue ticks posts on Twitter, screenshotted and posted back on Whatsapp giving it an air of authenticity.
Why is twitter so terrible today? Because there are so many toxic journalists on it.
https://medium.com/@Haje/who-are-twitter-s-verified-users-af...
Same thing with reddit. What happened to reddit? A publication company bought it and journalists are desperately trying to turn it into their propaganda platform.
Who is leading the charge against facebook and google? Journalists and news companies. Why? Because they want preferential treatment on these platforms and want to turn them into their fiefdoms.
The real question isn't why twitter is bad. It's why journalists, news companies, etc are so toxic. Why is journalism today no different than political party evangelism? Every news organization and journalist sound like political advocates and the mouthpiece of a political party. Why are so many journalists and news organizations working so hard to help one party or the other? I thought journalism and news was supposed to be about facts, not political advocacy?
It's strange how these journalists loved social media when their political candidate of choice won. Now, they are whining endlessly about social media. They are as much, if not more, of a problem than twitter or any other social media platform.
Economics twitter, finance twitter, bio twitter, art twitter, intellectual subgroup(s) and unaffiliated smartypants twitter are all amazing. I have met many people through twitter, been invited to private slacks, made real friends, and learned so much. I love the platform. Way more intellectual than any other social network.
I just 99% stay away from the political machine on there, and the "toxic rage" that everyone is clamouring about seems to pass me by.
But I had to do some promotion for work and created an account and got hooked in. There is no doubt a lot of junk and the trending stuff tends to be sports and politics, but just like Reddit there is a lot of cool stuff there if you wander off the beaten path.
Things like the #pico8 https://twitter.com/hashtag/pico8 where people are posting simple pico8 patterns or As the Film Ends https://twitter.com/endingsummary a bot which posts final sentences from Wikipedia film plot summaries, are just cool.
I hope the service can endure in some form so oddball stuff like this will remain.
Also privacy advocates and engineers, but why let that get in the way of a good spin eh?
"Why is twitter terrible today?" is a question that can only be answered by individuals, not systemically and objectively. You hate it because journos are trying to push their political agenda. I hate it because I feel it brings out my worst behavior. A 15 year old hates it because there's not enough dank memes anymore.
Social media's problem is people socializing. I really think it's that simple.
The problem is that some people have come to expect that everywhere they go is a safe-spaces, where ass holes don't exists or can be swiftly dealt with.
Sure, Twitter needs to have a way to deal with things that are just plain illegal, and for the health of the platform they may need to add some additional policing. But let's face it, it's not the average internet user who are using Twitter.
The issues facing Twitter isn't that people are leaving because it's a hostile place. People leaving are either bots or realising that Twitter isn't good place it interact with friends and family. Honestly, most people don't need Twitter, but the media, which is full of Twitter power users, seem to think that it's THE platform. We need to look at Twitter more as a supplement to LinkedIn and not as a Facebook competitor.
That's such a strange thing to say - isn't that a very reasonable expectation? Even in the outside world, the expectation is that you won't be dealing with assholes every minute of your life when you participate somewhere.
And the thing about modern internet is that it's really really hard to find ANY place where you don't have to deal with them. Even HN isn't immune to deliberate trolling and personal attacks.
Granted, HN is rather specific in its userbase.
It depends on how you define assholes - there are people who disagree with you everywhere.
That depends, I can't go into a ghetto area or a bar and say what ever I want and not expect people to react, regardless of how right I may be. I'm sure that this is an unpopular opinion but posting on Twitter is actively seeking out the ass holes and loud idiots.
As you reach a certain size, it becomes nearly impossible to moderate due to the volume of material. Also, what to moderate will always be a fight. If you have a 10 million users, and 3,000,000 of them say that something is offensive, and 3,000,000 of them say that it is not and needs to be left, you're in a real pickle. If you listen to either side, you're possible siding with a minority opinion. Even if you're siding with a minority, you're going to upset millions of people. And no matter what your stance, you're taking a stance (with either action or inaction).
What is the morally correct choice? It's the trolley problem every time a group gets offended (or counter-offended, or counter-counter-offended or...) Is it supposed to be a truly democratic state of majority, or a civil environment? What is the goal? None of these questions have "right" answers, just opinions. So what if you feel that your opinion is opposed by most of your users, who do you listen to?
True, Twitter and Facebook are not the first places when discussion tends to be angry and ugly. Old internet had plenty of that too. But it was also much more fragmented, it was quite easy to leave the toxic places and move to the nicer corners of the internet.
10-15 years ago they were hundreds of "social" products. But they almost all died (even Google could not keep up) due to an intense darwinian pressure. Only the angriest have survived, those that optimized like psychopaths for user engagement.