Fleets: A new way to join the conversation
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
It is clear that new user engagement metrics are still the only thing that really matters at a social media company. I recently deleted my Twitter account because it is a completely toxic place now. Until there is a clear metric for that, it will always be terrible.
They also sometimes randomly revert you to the new one and make you manually switch back again ...
Admittedly I switched to Mastodon months back and some weeds are to be expected as I have intentionally avoided Twitter, but it was pretty well curated when I was a heavy Twitter user, and I absolutely can blame Twitter directly for the low value of Promoted content and algorithm generated content I never directly followed and cannot directly curate.
The downside of the modern system is that the attention economics encourage hot takes, and the advertising economics encourage pushing only content likely to promote engagement, at the cost of reverse chronological order, and a full feed of everything you thought you signed up to read.
Because people are encouraged to act rashly, history in those types of environment is a mine for seeking out poorly thought out statements. It's built into the system.
The technical fix offered here is to erase history, which makes everyone effectively anonymous, as they can say what the want, causing real world effects, and the evidence disappears after X amount of time. Do we really want to make twitter and facebook even more like Lord of the Flies?
There are other ways to deal with this... limiting the audience of one's words to only the friends you have at the current time, and making that stick for all time, is the way to go, in my opinion. If someone isn't in your audience at the time you express a thought, they never will be. It's fairly easy to implement this with the addition of starting and ending times for access.... if I add Bob on November 17, 2020... the default might be to give access starting a Month earlier... and never ending... until it is revoked.
Here at HN, wiser people than me set up a system that seems remarkable resistant to "first post" pressure, and more rewarding of reflective contemplation that will stand the test of time.
Twitter is going to see this new "feature" heavily used to game a lot of things, once people catch on.
really? I thought the whole point of tweeting was that it was easy and no pressure?
Then I saw cross talk between radical Left Twitter and people I followed in tech. Uh oh. I got into exactly one political argument and realised that with my ADHD impulse control, my career, and my belief that homo sapiens is sexually dimorphic, I should not be on that site of I valued eating.
I deleted the account. Now I read Twitter, but I will not log in. Ever. I also deleted my Facebook account around that time.
Nowadays, I only use my real identity with people I know in private groups on self hosted servers. Even commenting here with a pseudonym gives me pause; every opinionated post is a liability if you get doxxed.
Twitter lost its "easy, no pressure" vibe when people started losing their job over old social media posts.
I guess that's why I've never used my real name.
I do also remember when Twitter wasn't so political. But all that changed when more information became available and people started to realize how serious our issues are. If you have concerns you shouldn't be afraid to speak up because that's how a Democracy works.
Yep, and I'm totally fine with people being accountable for their own words and actions.
If the concern is people being fired over something that's not actually that bad because of malicious actors making a mountain out of a molehill, then there's better ways to address that than making systematic changes to the way we communicate to allow people to suffer no consequences from proliferating hate speech.
The idea is not a terrible one, but the execution just seems to be incredibly confusing and poor. It seems like this is a a completely separate product that doesn't integrate well into the main app.
"Oh, they have the internet on computers now!" -- Homer Simpson, 1998
I mean, I foresee that happening anyway, but my guess is that this is an attempt to make it more difficult/less widespread.
Once something is publicly shared, it is permanently public, no matter what the platform tells you.
It'll be interesting to see how much effort Twitter puts into preventing scraping.
You could just make a phone call...
There's some plausible deniability, in other words. That's enough for some cases, and not enough for others.
I admire twitters engineering, they provided lots of excellent open source in Scala, but their product teams... Eesh
I mainly use Tweetdeck on desktop because at least it doesn't suck.
I feel like all the big media platforms need to be required by law to not editorialize on anyone else's content:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...
I wouldn't have made the connection between misinformation problems and ephemeral tweets were it not for your comment.
I.e. I predict politicians, activists, celebrities will stumble over them just the same.
As a thought experiment: do you think if Corbyn had fleeted his comment about that graffito, would it have really protected him? I find that unlikely.
Edit: and after typing this out, I'm pretty sure I actually think that last bit is a good thing, independent of my stance on the substance of the matter. But don't mistake "I can't see it anymore" for "nobody else will remember."
I'm pretty sure insurance companies, three letter agencies, and anyone else with a vested interest will make sure to have a copy of as many of these as they can get their hands on. And you won't be able to rely on yours not being in any of these stashes.
Public stays public.
HN is a huge community and I imagine full of ex-employees of Twitter, what exactly does the organization believe the businesses core focus/value is? Like what is the framework they are growing towards?
I returned to browsing Twitter more after the election, and IMO it hasn't changed, it's just a place to get your dopamine hit when you see a tweet you agree with get traction, or for some adrenaline when you read something supremely idiotic. I thought about replying to 1 or 2 tweets, but geez, will anyone read it, will it change anyone's mind?
https://www.politwoops.com/countries
They could easily record fleets as well.
The world isn't screaming either of those things, just some individuals living in a political bubble. Most of Twitters millions of users think Twitter is mostly fine.
Imagine there's a Fire Department in your city and most people are happy with it as they put out the fires, but it turns out a small subset of the houses are kept getting broken into by firefighters on duty. Wouldn’t people be concerned why the hell is Fire Department not getting act together and looking into the matter? Soon they might be the next ones that get broken into.
I would generally be on the side of weakening copyright over strengthen patents, but the disconnect between the two just seems strange when they theoretically are supposed to serve the exact same purpose.
There's an amazing variety of creative products that are based on the same idea; often the better ones aren't the first ones.
Disney's lawyers are famously litigious. I'm not clear that they would win a case here. (Although they might have success with this HN comment as evidence)
The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land (1987) has a similar high-level of comparison to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), and that case was thrown out.
"Both Willy [a wizard] and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures."
is very comparable to your completely hypothetical example above.
So, if a paragraph of cherry-picked, high-level description are the only identified similarities, there is no case in copyright law.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Marty_Krofft_Televisio....
Even if you flag a "fleet" for violating the rules, it will have vanished by the time it gets reviewed. "Oh, it's gone, so it's OK."
Twitter already has problems with harassment and tweets that are deleted before the report is reviewed. I would bet that harassment will be a problem for Fleets as well.
When you are an API customer you are supposed to honor all the actions that a user takes on their tweets (delete them from your in-house datastore if it's deleted from Twitter, for instance) but it's weakly/not enforced by Twitter.
If they start putting stuff that's inherently ephemeral into the API feed then how will they deal with making customers not just persist it anyway? Or maybe analytics for Fleets will only be provided by Twitter, which would be a bit of a slap to their API customers but at least Twitter can enforce the rules around the content.
[0] https://twittercommunity.com/t/will-twitter-api-support-flee...
Edit: I guess you can argue that "fleeting" is similar to "evanescent", but... No, I still think about the ships.
I don't understand what they mean by that. Just that it's similar to other platforms with temporary-disappearing messages?
What Twitter gives: self destructing tweets.