Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.
It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc.
I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating.
I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
It was independent then Twitter bought it.
There were alternatives before such as Seesmic, no idea how they work now, if they still do.
I rarely search but isn't that what hashtags solve?
I think changes could be good but history says it will be worse.
Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions?
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.
But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
"twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!"
case closed my circular dude
It's not a very good metric for measuring actual usefulness to users at all though.
We need a business model for social media where incentives for companies and their users actually line up.
"nonprofit" is not code for "zero revenue"
Min maxed “user engagement” is almost certainly a net negative for society at large
You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.
I use Twitter Web so infrequently that whenever I open it, it has always changed back to the "Top Tweets" view.
If only Twitter had separate URLs for the two styles, then I could just update my bookmark...
I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.
There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
You have just described an algorithm, I believe.
What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless.
Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
Bundle it under "experimental" or "advanced features" in an easy to use page with a very clear explanation of what each feature does.
I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.
Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
Twitter very likely did market research on its effectiveness for the target market they were trying to please. Probably that's just not you.
I like HN. But I never look at particular users' posts. I just look at the front page, or sometimes at the comments list, so see what people are talking about.
I think for it to work people would have to start blocking more and using more mute words.
The thing where someone retweets something horrible because they disagree with it is so wrong and is what is being badly gamed.
It's funny. For all that I support free speech, I don't have the patience to read much of it. So I end up gravitating to well moderated forums.
I want to turn them off completely.
I've taken to just unfollowing the users who they force notifications from.
Even though sometimes I'm generally interested in the user's content, I'll view it when I feel like it, not when Twitter wants me to.
Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.
Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.
The same reason you do anything - they’ll take their business elsewhere unless you provide service and support in the way they want it.
People don’t like being told to go away and follow some other procedure when they have a problem.
Might as well tell them they should avoid having any problems requiring support while you’re at it - that’ll make it even easier for you.
If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.
The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.
And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.
Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?
And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?
Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.
If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.
Note that the poster said "an official support channel" rather than "the official support channel". Adding more ways for customers to contact support is usually a good thing. There was no mention of taking away other channels that you might prefer.
If they ever fully disable 3rd party clients that will be the day I cancel my account. I thought forced ads as you started a DVD were obnoxious...
"Fully disable" - probably not. But they'll certainly make it nearly impossible to produce something "like the Twitter app but better".
My approach is now to unfollow any user when Twitter forces a notification from them. Maybe someone with some brains at Twitter will notice the clear pattern and fix their idiotic notifications.
I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
My interests are @thisdude and @thatchick. That's why it's called "social."
> And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising.
I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
I don't follow too many people so it just fills up my timeline with a little more stuff, otherwise it would be rather stale.
Judging by the amount of alt-right nonsense that gets promoted to me despite my complete disinterest I'd say they're fucking delighted.
It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.
For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
Well now you know why you're seeing what you're seeing.
Are programmers supposed to be some apolitical hyper-rational cohort?
Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality".
Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
It generalizes.
In my experience, people who assume that eventually progress to assuming that those are actually one and the same.
I'd say "liberal" is a more accurate descriptor than "left-leaning". I'd call PewDiePie liberal but not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, for example.
When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it.
If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
Bizarre interpretation.
Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
That said, I like following people because one of my interests is people.
Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential impact of our words and actions before hitting "Send". Only if you assume people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to design things so users will act better on their own vs having to be slapped down when they do something terrible.
I think the problem with this approach is that it assumes that typical users like you and me, not bots or people with a particular agenda or goal (i.e. brigading) are the primary sources of abuse.
Unfortunately I think it's much more likely to be the latter section of highly motivated users or bots that are responsible for a disproportion volume of abuse, and there's little incentive Twitter can create to motivate them otherwise
Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets
This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.
Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making 80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could still see and participate in their topics I care about.
This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just don't discuss certain topics with.
I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular topic.
_You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes".
Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better.
Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" - instead of take a look at whether that's users want.
Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.
IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.
Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.
How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.
But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/report-3-out-of-4-venture...
A) A "network", i.e. is friends with talented people
And has access to:
B) "Immense amounts of cash". How much cash? 1 million? 10? 100?
Can easily earn a 10x-100x return on that money? You think turning 10 million into 100 million is easy? Do you know how many people are trying to do that? Do you have any idea how difficult that is even with access to a network and cash?
Money is extremely cheap. The biggest problem in silicon valley right now isn't access to capital - it's that there's too much capital chasing too few good ideas. VCs are desperate for something worth investing in, precisely because of how hard it is to create a good company.
You've obviously never actually started a company. Talk to me when you have. People with money flame out every day. A huge percentage of companies that do receive VC funding fail. Way, way more than half. An infinitesimal fraction of companies VCs invest in go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. An even smaller fraction of those go on to be worth more than 10 billion dollars. Jack Dorsey created two of them. There are only a handful of people on earth who have done that. And when I say a handful, I mean like you can literally count them on your hands.
There is an alternative explanation https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/speechless-mel...
The issue is, would a random person off the street be able to take VC seed money and turn it into a billion dollar business? The answer is obviously no. And they definitely wouldn't be able to do it twice.
But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.
How do you know? What evidence do you have of these imaginary other's merit?
You realize Square is a thriving, $31B public company at the time of this comment?
Starting a company is one thing. Creating the phenomenon that is Square is quite another.
Square is amazing, but a B2B, modern Point-of-Sales for SMBs is an entirely different beast than a free, B2C social network. Jack can be great at one, and terrible at the other, at the same time. These are not related.
My take on the founding of twitter is that you had a bunch of people and no clear leadership, and that different people had different opinions of what twitter should be. That ambiguity has undermined the platform from day one, no focus, no clear mission, no clear plan on how to spend their money.
A better way to express this is that if what you're trying to OPTIMIZE is wrong you're going to make an optimally poor product.
They're starting with really poor initial assumptions that things like more pageviews is always a good thing
You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all, if you follow a robotics enthusiast, you WILL see some tweets about robotics among all the sneezing.
If you are talking social networks in general, OK, then perhaps you'd have some options.
You also need people who want to use your network, though.
A thought experiment: Imagine Twitter was the only way to distribute information. How would that world look like? Everyone who doesn't have followers would almost have no chance of having followers and therefore their content will keep disappearing in Twitter blackhole regardless of how useful it might have been (given how bad their search is). Twitter algorithms takes rich-gets-richer phenomenon to whole new level. At times, it feels their algorithms wants to re-establish ancient model of nobility vs plebs. The whole notion of "follower" has negative connotations with implied power-play top-down relationship. I have seen people with mid-range follower count not following others even when they find them interesting because they don't want to ruin their followers/followee ratio. The notion of follower as opposed to friend or contact firmly puts in place one-way power structure, the information broadcast instead of information exchange model. Many folks have resorted to always following back any followers in protest of this model while many others resist following anyone who they don't consider their peers in power structure created by Twitter Universe.
A minimal fix Twitter can do is to identify good tweets from followers and occasionally show it to followees to at least have a shot at 2-way relationships. The current scheme of "likes" doesn't cut it because first one wins and everyone else gets buried deep. When people ask why Twitter is not so successful with larger population, not so much growing and still relatively quite small (after subtracting bots), I often get surprised they don't see above as the most fundamental issues with their model of social relationships itself.
What I mean by human nature is that humans will always follow celebrity sneezes, and seek to slack off.
I don't think Twitter could invent a ranking that would give the robotics enthusiast a following of 10 million people and weed out the celebrity person. They could do that - but people would stop using the service and switch over to Instagram.
One major issue, once social networks introduce ranking, is the question who they rank for. If the algorithm tries to maximize engagement, it will happily promote the celebrity sneezes. Of course algorithms could optimize for other things (personal development or whatever), limited by people actually keeping to use the service.
In the early days afaik Twitter had no ranking and filtering at all.
If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news website already.
It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in vaguely similar stuff that people in other rooms are saying, and then sorts all messages in order of whoever is the most popular or says the most relevant keywords.
Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot. You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their product endorsements, whatever.
It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all talking very loudly at each other about random topics.
Absolutely, we need tags, and the ability to make them opt-in or opt-out for followers. So I can file ^food as an opt-in, and people who don't care about that can ignore them and just get the ^programming ones. Right now, followers and friends are all lumped together and so while friends follow you for life updates, followers generally only care about what you can do for them, eg your work. It's draining to try and manage multiple accounts. Some followers may find the side stuff cool, too.
Yes, I realize they are tricky to implement and subject to abuse but imagine you got points for using your real name, real photo, demerits for insults etc, then users could filter out hordes of trolls and gutter nonsense and instead focus on the meaningful conversations that do actually occur there -- the verified checkmark is a proto-version of this.
Instead they rely solely on blacklisting, which is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Even HN has a more sophisticated system, where users can be shadow banned or have their comments appear lower than normal.
Not sure how useful this macro-scale philosophizing by Dorsey on Twitter itself is for delivering new, useful features to users. Serious question: has Twitter released any new, major features in the last 2-3 years?
I'd like to see them try other things too. One of the nice features in G+ was that the owner of a thread (the originator) could delete replies. I think that could work nicely in Twitter too.
Interesting; I think adding this feature without changing anything else would severely exacerbate the already intolerable echo-chamber effect. Sure, trolling and abuse would lose visibility, but so would even slightly contrary opinions. Thought bubbles would shrink even further, and the platform would become even less enjoyable. (Context: I'm a light Twitter user, reading ~10 min/day and sending 1-2 tweets/month)
Take Maggie Haberman, NYT reporter. Her Twitter replies are always a cesspool...what if she could lock down her tweets so only a whitelisted group of users (say people she follows) could comment? You'd still (hopefully) get contrary opinions but none of the dreck that dominates her feed now.
I don't know if that's the answer. But I don't see Twitter even trying, just Dorsey waxing philosophical about it.
If it's her thread, she should be able to curate it in anyway she wants.
Not having a real name on Twitter isn't even a good heuristic for anything.
But my point is not real photos/names as the be-all, end-all. How about many heuristics, and let users filter accordingly? All this data available and none of it is used to improve the user experience, at least as far as I can tell.
HN has such low volume that it can be centrally curated by a few people who enforce policies like "no flame bait -- and I'll know it when I see it." Or, for example, when someone writes a quick attack on HN, they are encouraged to flesh out their point with substance which is something that Twitter fundamentally discourages.
It's hard for me to see any way forward for Twitter. By design, it amplifies the worst characteristics of humans from tribalism to outrage fetishism.
For instance, even if you configured Twitter to never see posts from the opposing cultural faction or trolls (usually used as synonyms), the people you follow will retweet/quote them and bring them back into your feed.
If you have troll engagers in your feed, unfollow them. But right now I have no way of filtering replies...it's frustrating. No system is perfect but let's at least TRY to improve the status quo.
If Twitter is consistently beta-testing new features to improve the quality of the UX/tweet replies, I personally am not seeing it.
It's like how you can /ignore someone on IRC and phpbb, but nobody actually does. They only threaten it. Hell yes they want to be clued in when you open your mouth so they can bark back! Humans love it.
Look how many people waste their time responding to Donald Trump's tweets with things like "RESIGN!" They could unfollow Trump. But they choose to spend their precious time on earth bickering about Trump because it's pure entertainment.
What also happens though is that we kinda know this. The more astute/introspective people will realize Twitter isn't bringing out the best in us. Sam Harris lamented this a while back and was able to quit Twitter for a couple days before being driven back to the crack.
I find myself doing this on HN too. Ever read a headline like "Javascript sucks", know the arguments you'll find in the HN comments, and click in to respond to one? The whole reason I'm here is to socialize, so I don't think filtering can be very effective. I'm not going to filter out the very things that draw me like the opportunity to call someone out on the internet, which is the same reason why nobody uses the ignore feature on forums.
Nobody would use the block feature on Twitter if it didn't tell the other person you blocked them.
There are some bugs in basic human psychology that I'm not so sure technology is ready to solve. Maybe this is the Great Filter that no civilization can surpass in the Fermi paradox.
Well, there is a "mute" feature which acts a lot like a "silent" block, and plenty of people use that.
The real problem is that reputation can't be absolute but is relative to a context. Hence the blockbot partial solution.
If some people want more interesting opinions, great. If others want more bland but less abuse, also great. Right now you can't filter for anything and most of tweet replies are a giant waste of time.
Becuase you might not like - or they might not want you to see things that are popular.
How much would you complain if your Twitter feed was filled with Trump tweets? Better yet, how much would they not like that!? - Sorry though it's based on reputation levels and his is up there relative to non-famous users.
Double-length tweets is the most major thing that comes to mind for me.
I guess what I mean is: what innovative features have they introduced?
>Instead they rely solely on blacklisting
twitter has implemented very heavy handed throttling as well in order limit the reach of users deemed unsavory. whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate. in some sense i wonder if these networks have simply become too generalized to be moderated effectively in a manner that satisfies all of the different facets of the userbase.
This is probably true for the majority of Twitter's users, but this is completely the opposite of what I want. Even with aggressively pruning the list of people I follow, I still feel the need to maintain topical lists with few people on them. (One of them is literally called "interesting" - it's for people who don't post often, but whose tweets I'm very interested in seeing, in chronological order, and don't want to lose in the shuffle and retweets and random shit twitter tries to inject into my stream.)
I want to curate my own content.
Wasn't the attraction that you could follow someone who matched your interests, like "antique model steam engine refurbishment", or whatever niche interest an individual might have? If twitter had a vetted list of large creators, they'd be right back in the "all of this network content is lowest-common-denominator dreck" situation that ABC/CBS/NBC were in circa 1985. Which may not be a bad thing for society as a whole (we can have an agreed-upon set of facts again! No alternate facts!), but why did we go through 30 years of media upheavals and the loss of the good things about newspapers and TV (equal time doctrine) to get back there? Was this all just about creating a different set of media moguls?
If you are single mindedly contented with some obscure niche you have so many wonderful options today because nothing is easier to advertise to than groups with really specific interests that require buying things.
What's lacking is well rounded, pleasant experiences. I'm not a collection of discrete interests and I definitely don't want to become one nor am I interested in meeting one.
Except they made a mistake, and one person slipped through the net, and was completely miserable and driven insane by this.
To answer your actual question, I bet most social networks would be perfectly fine with just being mass market gatekeepers. It's expensive to have 100,000 newspapers and TV networks to appear customized enough for everyone watching; but it's cheap to have 100,000 versions of Facebook's wall, or Reddit's front page.
Seems like this can definitely be done with a combination of a reputation system and post stats like acceleration/momentum.
The solution here is to go places they normally advertise and astro-turf groups that "object" to whatever they are already advertised near.
They will have to learn that no matter what you do, somebody will be upset.
This concisely expresses many of my misgivings with the Internet today. Things have been dumbed down and often cater to the lowest common denominator that people share. Evolutionarily speaking, it's chasing after low-hanging fruit (cheap and easy) and then hyper-optimizing for it to the point that it's all that remains. The problem is that it's sterile and dumbed down.
I don't like that we can't customize things or get out of the sandbox anymore now that everything has been siloed. With email and RSS we could construct filters and programmatically access our data. We could change the interface, query, backup, share.
The platform powers that be are dictating how today's internet works. They're taking away our browser tech (Chrome everywhere, increasingly without add-ons). We can't export our data in meaningful formats.
This is the hell future 1990's Microsoft could only dream of.
For whatever reason, Jack feels like he needs this to make Twitter more money and is trying to sell it as a benefit for active users. But it's really pissing on the active userbase and claiming that it's raining.
Readers want to see the content they select, in the order they select, from people/posters they find interesting. Have conversations and maybe connect with people they follow.
Posters want to control their feed and who sees it, control the conversation a bit more, perhaps pay for better tools to curate replies, get rid of spam/trolls etc, have their complaints about stalking/nazis/trolls taken seriously by someone who cares.
Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter because advertisers are their only customer - they are forced by their bottom line to find ever more inventive ways to boost impressions (the overwhelming notifications, the dystopian 'home' view which shows you content selected by twitter, showing likes, plays for engagement/eyeballs rather than quality, and now this new 'interest-based network' idea which lets twitter select content). Facebook suffers from the same disease - they must own your feed and your attention, any user control hits their bottom line.
The solution is of course the radical option of removing advertising entirely.
Readers should always be free as they donate their time and attention.
Posters with thousands of followers (whether businesses or individuals) would happily pay for better tools to manage their readers, manage the feed, manage responses to posts etc. Some of them would pay quite a lot for more control/access.
Journalists, traders, businesses, developers would pay for access to a firehose of data and ways of working with that data (public data with user permission of course).
I'd pay to broadcast on a version of twitter without ads, nazis and trolls, wouldn't you?
(I know I wouldn't pay to post because I have lurked on metafilter for most of its life but never paid the $5 to post)
Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content.
Without advertising, that means the service cannot make a profit.
Maybe that's the solution to the puzzle.
I think that's only true if you try to charge all posters.
Advertising is actively damaging our social networks, as it did newspapers before them.
Maximizing the benefit to readers means getting the most and best content. Charging posters will eliminate some posts which is bad for readers.
And when a poster is willing to pay, that means the poster is profiting from the content, which means there's some motive other than writing the best content for the reader.
So my argument is that any financial gain for the operator, whether from advertising or directly charging users, will diminish the value of the service for both readers and posters.
If the goal is the best possible conversation, then let's look to non-commercial models that remove the distorting and corrupting influence of profit.
So propose a non-commercial model which would work and cover all costs (including hosting).
Content producers on the other hand are an assorted mix of businesses (make money from attention/clicks), personalities (make money from attention), influencers (make money from attention), academics (no money). If you have an audience many of them would pay.
You could charge the top 10% of content producers/businesses for better tools they would use and ask for all the time (moderation, blocking, shadowbanning etc), and also sell the public data of a popular service like this (for sentiment analysis, trending topics etc), and have a very healthy business model.
There is no need for advertising, it is actively harmful, and it results in misaligned incentives, but if you try to make it reader funded it would IMO fail too - several services have, I think I saw one on HN a few months ago, but the now defunct app dot net is the most prominent example.
You guys on HN keep saying this.
I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time to watch and they "forget" to copy half their content to European servers.) In addition I've supported Wintergatan on YouTube lately.
I could even pay more if it wasn't that almost every newspaper and what not seems obsessed with the subscription idea, I cannot subscribe to all of you but I'd be happy to pay 1/4, 1/2 or even $1 for a single story that I want to read.
Am I alone? Is everyone else so "smart" to sit back with their adblockers, torrent clients and what not and just complain about how it seems to get worse?
Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce and are thus actually valuable. Twitter and Facebook and much of the free Web is dreck that is not worth paying for.
I do think there is a segment of users who would pay though - those who use the platform to broadcast and want to have a bit more control over their feeds/profile/comments.
This is true, but it's not only advertising. Replace ads with any revenue generator large enough to sustain the service and you'll find that (1) the audience disappears or (2) big compromises in user experience or privacy.
Maybe some services just can't be delivered by profit-maximizing corporations at all.
A big reason for the wildly improbable success of Wikipedia and Craigslist is that they are non-commercial. No ads, no subscriptions, no selling firehose data, no paying for more access, no "freemium".
We need an alternative asymmetrical social media service that is free for readers, free for posters, fosters deeper discussions than Reddit, and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls.
Maybe the only way to accomplish that is with a community-driven collective effort, not a commercially-driven corporate service.
> Last year, Craigslist took in upwards of $690 million in revenue, most of which is net profit, according to an estimate by the AIM Group, an Altamonte Springs, Florida-based research firm. Based on valuations of comparable publicly traded companies including eBay EBAY +0%, Forbes conservatively estimates that Craigslist is worth at least $3 billion. That makes Newmark, 64, who owns at least 42% of the company, worth at least $1.3 billion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-cra...
And there you become one of the haters. Purge thyself.
A modest fee to join/unban yourself (and not infrequent bannings) worked for Something Awful but social media is slowly killing it off.
Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.)
In short form:
Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers."
Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though.
Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts.
Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal.
Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android.
And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).
In case this is useful my concerns would be on seeing your home page - Is this going to go out of business in 2 years and lose my stuff? Do I want to pay to post drivel about my life, and retweet the odd thing?
I don't really use twitter for personal blogging, and don't think I'd pay for it, but it's really interesting to see that there are probably several different audiences using twitter for such different things and your service is aimed at a different segment.
The value in twitter for me is the posts from prominent people in various industries who expose what they're really thinking, their foibles, interests and links to interesting research they've just read. I put up with all the drama, nazis and ads for that alone. I use several accounts to follow/promote different interests, and for some businesses, but wouldn't pay for personal use.
Personally I'm really skeptical of a federated network, it's a solution to a problem I don't have, which introduces other problems, but it's not a blocker, I just think it's a distraction to the real problems of social media.
So I have no idea if it's going to go out of business in two years, although I guess I wouldn't really know that even if it was mine. :) Those are always the big questions -- is the service viable, and are you going to use it enough to make it worth it? (And those two questions are connected, since enough people have to say "yes" to the second question to make a "yes" to the first question possible.)
I still use Twitter, and I use Mastodon, too, although I'm less sanguine about Mastodon than most of its proponents seem to be.
This is an attempt to keep that dynamic from forming in the first place.
Or possibly worse, we don't realize that it's exactly what the government wants.
On Twitter, I follow people who post good stuff sometimes, but they also post other stuff that's irrelevant. Worse, I see stuff they "like" which is often inflamatory.
I want to follow science person’s science tweets and hide science person’s politics tweets.
You can force people to tag their tweets by letting us only follow their tags.
Science person’s profile can show top followed tags of Science person.
#science followed by 100
#politics followed by 5
“Was that the right decision at the time? Probably not,” he said. “If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much … I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.”
If you put something in front of people that looks like a score, they will start thinking of it as a score. And then they will inevitably start recognizing and incorporating behaviors that tend to increase their personal score. Which leads to competition among them as to who can rack up the highest score, and that competition drives them into a spiral of increasingly extreme behavior in order to stay ahead of the pack.
If Twitter was smart they would just stop displaying follower, like and retweet counts altogether, or at least hide them away someplace deep within a pile of submenus and dialog boxes. Displaying this information prominently is what created the feedback loop that made Twitter into the cesspool it is today.
Don’t ban accounts. Let us choose our moderators. You can hide accounts from the mainstream with your moderation. We want to see all accounts. You already do it for porn and countries.
Social Media Moderation without Banning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466490
Trusting information isn't only about trusting the source, it's also about whether that piece of information fits into your established frame of reference for how the world works. It also depends on how many different emotional buttons the information presses, fear being the strongest.
Shifting to an interest-based delivery system would only reinforce filter bubbles. And what's the alternative? Forcing people to see things you know they'd disagree with? Somewhere in the middle?
I worry a lot more about the rise of advertorials and product placements replacing traditional advertising, than I do about the visibility or importance of follower counts.
So now the shameless plug: we built Bettr.social from the ground up to support groups for just this very reason. Users want the option of joining and/or creating their own groups that have control over content and behavior. It's sort of like a "Twitter with groups". You can also follow hashtags so you can follow topics, and not get someone's personal political views mixed in with their sports analysis or whatever. Not sure why Twitter has never allowed following hashtags. Weibo does.
Dorsey also mentioned the "Like." Facebook did well adding more reactions that just "like." People may like a post for different reasons, and people may react to a post in other ways than a "like." If there's no other reaction available, then they'll write something, often something nasty, and then the discussion can continue to go nasty and perpetuate. At Bettr.social we have several reactions like skeptical, troll, wow, and others (even Fake News). We think this helps reduce the snide remarks and drive-by one-time insults.
I don't think Twitter has innovated much in user experience in the past several years. They've change algorithms, and AI detection of abuse, but the features haven't really changed in awhile. And although not all change is good, it seems like there should have been some changes for the better in the UX.
So reddit.
If you stick to smaller, interested based subs, reddit is a far superior product because it has human moderators and threading. The "breaking news" aspect of Twitter is extremely oversold imo, but people post things just as quickly on reddit.
TV news and online news sites usually lag behind and rarely fact-check the "breaking news" so they're generally only worth paying attention days or weeks later when all the fact checking is done. If they're up to date, they're mostly recycling other people's content from social media without attributing any sources or real fact checking. If they're not recycling social media they're generally so vague and non-committal that they basically tell you nothing.
When the Notre Dame fire broke out the only thing I saw on TV was a short matter-of-fact notice in the evening news. Social media had live streams and people linking to articles about the renovations etc.
I’ve opted-out by deleting my account and choosing not to visit the Twitter site. I’ve done the same with Facebook following the same principle. I won’t suggest that my decision had no costs; I miss out on conversations I could learn from and have to be more intentional about reaching out to people in my network. But the costs are far outweighed by the benefits: less frustration, less anxiety, less FOMO.
I highly recommend opting-out to anyone who’s become fed up with the platforms, their conduct or policies, or the way they are made to feel using their products.
Not removing the problems, but removing the addictiveness. Once we reduce the problem space of inputs to people who aren’t addicted, the results should be a lot less difficult to parse.
Visibility into why a post is top of page should not be granted through an integer mapped on a scale of 0 to infinity at any level of precision.
Not for upvotes, downvotes, replies, reposts. Not for unsolicited messages, or “X hours ago” (yes, time durations are 0..+/-inf integers, loophole denied).
High score chasing will be the madness of us all. If I could write a web extension to filter every page’s counts away I would, but I cannot figure it out in my spare time.
Map onto decaying average percentiles of traffic over X days, so that high-traffic posts are super bold and low traffic ones aren’t, or use 2-D colormaps (not Jet) and up/down arrows centered around 50th percentile. Relative comparison is absolutely invaluable and is a perk print newspapers don’t have.
I hope HN tests this someday.
But the screenshots indicate that they’re still showing the count to the user who posted, which is the only user that must not see them. Nice try, but it won’t be sufficient.
Also, I don't recognize the issues lots of people have with Twitter, because I mostly only see the original tweets and only follow mostly sensible people that post interesting stuff (scientists, AI & robotics folks, tech journalists, some space exploration accounts).
And they’ve been bugging me so much to sign in I feel like I can’t give in if I’ve come this far.
...is a shortcut for activating the following filters: filter:follows -filter:replies
However, to your point, it still requires you to be signed in to work.
I believe the core experience of Twitter has reached most everyone in the world who likes it. [...]
Sometimes, the product-market fit with early adopters is only that. The product won't go mainstream because other people don't want or need that product. In these cases, the key to unlocking growth is usually customer segmentation, creating different products for different users. ... The problem is that for those who don't use Twitter, almost all of its ideal attributes among the early adopter cohort are those which other people find bewildering and unattractive. ... It's not surprising to me that Twitter is populated heavily by journalists and a certain cohort of techies and intellectuals who all, to me, are part of a broader species of infovore.
source: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptote...
There are some cool things on the platform, but the signal to noise ratio is horrible.
My gut feel is that a global public soapbox is not a workable idea. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I just can't see how it can be done.
It'll be interesting to see how Jack Dorsey reacts to that.
Edit: if anyone happening to read this works for Twitter or has the capability to pass a message to @jack, here's a free idea for a pivot to your business model:
Offer hosted ActivityPub federation utilizing your existing Twitter platform. In other words, become the "Google Apps for Your Domain/G Suite" for hosted ActivityPub instances. Media organizations, governments, and celebs should be paying a premium for the content hosting you provide today for free.
Let's be clear here, he's not going to change it. He's going to continue to waffle around and pretend he wants to change, and it's not going to happen.
Can we stop giving air to these excuse publications?
I dated a girl who worked on a moderation team at FB 2-3 yrs ago, as the fake news problem started getting traction. They had a serious smokescreen of corporate sounding names for the teams, roles and tasks. The tasks were very obviously editing, fact checking, and such... Much of it politically oriented. Meanwhile, they seemed to be in knots trying to make their obviously journalistic job seem like subcategories of spam or abusive IM related jobs. They didn't hire journalists (even though they are cheap and plentiful).
Twitter at least recognizes that they're the news, they're journalism, they're political.
That doesn't/won't necessarily/probably lead to anything useful, but there's an honesty in it that I respect.
Healthy discussions, engaging topics and interests, no clear political slant in either direction, with multiple groups and opinions represented (you know, real diversity of thought). Finally no ads being shoved down my throat unless its engaging content disguised as an advert that reaches the top, in which case I am OK with because at least the advertiser tried, and it got support enough to be upvoted and shared.
Sounds like Twitter is taking a page from Google and not knowing when to leave well enough alone.
Why did social media go from a simple platform where people followed other people or interests to a place where they have to manage everything? How did it change from a platform where people can express whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted to a platform where social media has to say what people can or cannot say?
Seems like overnight social media turned from a place of user expression to a place of user control.
The social media market seems ripe for a disruption, imho. It sounds crazy, to try and topple these current networks. But it's happened before.
One direction would be Hacker News' model of a more restrictive approach where new users must grind up their trust score in order to receive full citizenship.
My friends have better things to do than to post to Twitter 20 times per day. A bunch of firehose feeds (NYTimes news updates, for example) or Twitter celebrities (Nicole Cliffe) will make it impossible to see the signal.
A simple UI change (a "I don't plan to make any more tweets for 4 hours" button) should make this filtering trivial to accomplish.
A large number of people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the advantages of a public twitter, primarily publicity and fame, but they can't deal with the darker side of human nature. Twitter should do everything they can to tame that darker side, because fundamentally their platform is built on public discourse, not private cliques, but its a losing battle. And moreover, any control they exert has the unintentional effect of polarizing people further, which makes the problem worse; Twitter is, to a degree, their own worst enemy.
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
So, Reddit.
Twitter is trying to steer clear of a massive storm on the horizon, except the ship has a hundred million people on it and most of them want to sail right into the Eye. They may be in for a small shock when they realize that it won't work.
Its far beyond the product they publish to the app store; there's a culture on there that you can't just change. You can't change a few lines of code and expect people to behave differently, or still want to install it. Facebook was very smart and knew this; the primary platform got took over by grandmas and bad flash games, so they started buying tangential properties like Insta and Whatsapp.
That's how Reddit and (to a lesser extent) HN work.
Even better: completely decentralized.
Leverage it as a protocol. Let clients charge how they want for additional features / and or advertising outside of the main intents.
What do shareholders think of this?
Don't show "likes" to anyone but the person who made the comment.
When I view what Dorsey is saying through the lens of the Rogan interview, I don’t see a push towards “algorithmic feeds” which you have already, but towards something where the users actually have more control over what they see, not less. But it’s impossible to tell from these short quotes.
What’s fascinating is the ambiguity of goals and responsibilities Twitter has regarding “hate speech” and so forth.
The quotes in the article seem to indicate questions presuming toxic viewpoints need to have their platform removed, the questions in the Rogan interview work from the assumption stifling speech is bad, and Dorsey keeps saying he is concerned about the safety of individual users.
It’s bewildering because I’m not sure anyone really understands what anyone else is even trying to accomplish.
It sounds like he's been looking into the issue and taking some executive action to stop the platform from being controlled by a single ideology group.
Christ, the self-importance of the Twitterverse is astonishing. What they don't say out loud is that Trump and Brexiteers and others they oppose have used the platform to effectively end-run the media, they hate that, but they can't figure out a way to stop them. A little bit of plain speaking would be refreshing.
In my experience, there are primarily three kinds of people that regularly claim there's a lot on the line, and it doesn't matter what their political views are. 1) young people that are inexperienced, 2) people that need to feel good about fighting for something important, and 3) people that exploit the other two by appealing to that. It's a good tactic to motivate your base, but like crying wolf, it loses it's effectiveness when done too often.
More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century, making predictions of that correct. Obviously neither life nor the universe have ended as many times in that period.
Furthermore, I know of no well informed people that have ever predicted the later but many who have successfully predicted the former.
Edit: It also begs the question of whether democracy is the best form of government for every country, but I leave that aside, since I'm not sure we've reached agreement on whether Twitter is really that important or influential in the lives of governments and societies.
Is "the party I prefer has lost the election" the same as "a democracy has fallen"? Because I really don't see a dozen democracies that left democracy behind, and certainly not many times that. I suppose it depends on your definition of democracy, but for anything close to the common understanding of a modern liberal democracy, that just sounds ridiculous.
Google Plus.
Now excuse me while I shed no tears for Jack.
Paradoxically, uncertainty about messages would slow down the spread of fake news and hate speech.
tl;dr: Tweets Are Not News.
The other alternative: we all stop using Twitter. There's simply no need for it.
Maybe there should be a 'journalist Twitter feed' that journos can comment and post on, but with no comments. So we get the live action, but not the clutter.
All pop culture and political tweeting is rubbish.
It’s within their legal rights and it would irritate him. Seems like a no brainer.
Later, after having invented and patented a product, I came to the sobering realization that the majority of my revenue was coming from MLM companies.
I released the IP to the public domain and shut down the company.
One particularly nasty individual with a blue checkmark has the habit of screenshotting people who disagree with her, and then unleashing her followers on them. It’s almost impossible to critically engage with this individual without risking being destroyed professionally or personally. Twitter’s response seems to be quietly demoting Tweets, but there is definitely a power dynamic at play with people who have high follower counts, and it isn’t in favor of Twitter.
> “We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”
We need to stop useful community content from getting black holed into walled gardens of Eternal September.