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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.

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The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unknown artist or developer can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit."

Said nobody ever.

(I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in Twitter circa 2011 before the "brands" arrived. I'd totally given up by about 2018 and deleted my account.)

Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that? There is clearly at least one person who feels that way.

It felt tongue in cheek to me since they went on to somewhat agree that signal boosting via retweets at least used to be nice. But I agree, it was a bit weird of a response.

I made a minor but critical small edit to what the person just said. I switched "unknown artist or developer" to "unwanted company or brand" - which to me at least, is a super accurate change in majority user base between Twitter 2010 and Twitter 2020.

Now ask yourself if anybody ever said what you're responding to?

You could’ve put the changed parts in italics (you’re still in the edit window and can do it). Most people wouldn’t realize this while they scan through replies, especially when you appear to be quoting verbatim.

Man, I did not see that change... I read it a couple of times, too, to make sure it was the same.

> Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that?

No they did not. If you read it carefully you'll note there's a slight change. I missed it too on first read.

I'm surprised that up until now I've never seen someone on HN comment about following artists on Twitter. This is all I ever use Twitter for, never tweet myself, and unfollow people who only make passing statements that can be made up in a few seconds. My feed is almost entirely filled with people who use Twitter as something like Deviantart or Pixiv to upload original artwork and only use the character count for writing a description or title, or sometimes nothing at all and only posting artwork to speak for itself. This is entirely separate from some people's impression of Twitter as a breeding ground for arguments. People don't really argue as much in this specific subset of Twitter for some reason.

If Twitter went away then that specific platform would also go away. True, it's sad that said platform is also a hub of tribes and divisive arguments and design patterns that support mindless retweeting, but that's just how social media that needs to keep expanding its audience is designed. If an audience wanting to be a part of that culture by giving in to those patterns without slowing down to analyze the ulterior motives of social media companies like HN commenters often do motivates artists and creators to bring their work there, as they now have a sizeable audience, then I can't really complain or force them to move elsewhere. That would just be exacerbating the same issue of being divisive. I can't force these people off Twitter just because most of Twitter personally bothers me.

Yet, that still isn't enough to prevent the occasional content creator from retweeting something from a different handle that shows up on your timeline, and that specific retweet has nothing to do with the content you want to see and delves into divisive or political territory. But you also receive value from the person who retweeted it through their art. It just goes to show that separating these things is a human issue with no easy solution, and it's tempting to get frustrated at the status quo.

> My feed is almost entirely filled with people who use Twitter as something like Deviantart or Pixiv to upload original artwork and only use the character count for writing a description or title

Me too! If I discover an artist I like, I'll scroll through their feed quickly before I decide to follow. If they tweet mostly one liners or politics with only the occasional artwork, then it's a pass from me.

One other thing I'd suggest is muting certain keywords. Adding political terms to your mute list can clean things up significantly.

Why would you follow people that retweet brands? Retweets work just fine as a discovery mechanism for me still. (EDIT: not to forget, you can disable retweets for people you want to otherwise follow nowadays)

An honest UI might use the word “echo” rather than “retweet”.

Retweet used to actually retweet things (i.e. pretend "RT" and the OP's handle), so it's like the floppy disk icon. Parler uses a megaphone.

It's amusing to me the retweets (and hashtags) were emergent behaviour of early Twitter users, not any sort of well thought out plan for how the platform was intended to work.

And then the platform owners mostly misunderstood the problem and emergent solution, and natively implemented something similar but optimised for advertising sales metrics ("engagement!") instead of what the users were actually doing.

And then as the user base changed from it's early-userbase to being heavily biased to marketers (sorry, "influencers" and/or advertisers), and social media expert gurus started talking about "message amplification" - and so we end up with new contenders in the field thinking that the lack of ability to shout "brand messages" through a megaphone was the problem those early users "invented" retweeting to solve... <sigh>

(And now I'm imagining a world where a St*rbucks-like cafe chain hands megaphones to everybody as they enter the store, with the implicit understanding that you shout out every interesting bit of conversation you overhear, which inevitably quickly develops into people only shouting out other people's megaphone shouts because that's all you can hear, until eventually if crescendos into a Hendrix-esque never ending earsplitting feedback wail - probably Star Spangled Banner for maximum crudeness... Has Black Mirror done this yet?)

God so much this. Manual retweets didn't really work like the feature Twitter implemented do and they had drastically different effects on content spread. Quote tweets (which were also emergent before rts even became a feature) are actually closer in those terms.

But because the button is right there the more useful emergent version died completely off.

Perhaps "parrot", given the parent platform's choice of terminology?

"I totally made the world a better place today! I , ummm, yeah. So. I just parroted an actual activist's well thought out and carefully composed tweet, instead of doing anything of substance at all myself... What am I doing with my life? <sobs>"

> instead of doing anything of substance at all myself

Does amplification of messages count as "nothing of substance"? "Getting the message out" is a crucial part of activism, is it not?

Retweet is more on brand.

And then it would be filed under a "chamber" category on your profile. Just as a friendly reminder of where you were heading...

> But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.

People still re-share it, Instagram just encourages and rewards you to just steal the content and pretend it's your own and because the system doesn't support hyperlinking it's very difficult to call people out on it.

It's a huge issue for any artists on the platform.

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