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Comment by thallavajhula | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they included this

>Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others. We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.

It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. They didn't have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a nice touch.

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Yeah I actually really respect that they axed something within a timely span, posted about their thoughts, and well, lately the Twitter team has been killing it as far as deploying features and long talked about stuff, so it's all good. The idea of Fleets, whether it was inspired by Stories etc, was another way to engage users and it did have some usefulness. I love the 24hr disappearing thing on IG and I liked it similarly here.

The glaring omission is a time limited typo edit window. Just ducking ship it already.

I would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter.

This isn't as simple as counting the number of changed characters, especially when you have to consider at least dozens, better hundreds, of languages.

But then again you can already cram about ten times as much meaning into a single tweet if you write in Chinese or Japanese, so maybe they just don't care.

> I would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter.

I feel like GitHub already solved that problem by showing an edit history on comments. Twitter could do the same thing.

Even easier: don't actually publish tweets for 60 seconds, during which time they can be edited.

Having a time where it's not actually posted would work fine but probably not be super effective: after all, you already have an unlimited amount of time to look at the message sitting on your screen before you actually send it. It's just often very hard to read your own writing for typos. Still it would be a step forward. You could even make it opt-in.

Haha, I swear every time I wish I could edit a tweet it's within 5 minutes after I post it. To be fair, at least with my incredibly limited followers, that's soon enough I can just delete it and post it again without losing too much engagement, but still. I'm just not patient enough to proof-read properly, apparently.

How about a preview then?

Facebook already has similar edit functionality and I’m curious how many users click through to see the edits. I’ll be the number is not high.

The speed Twitter moves I think a lot more people are going to mash the retweet button than the “see edits” button.

Facebooks edit history is also hidden in grey text next to the timestamp. I bet putting a "This tweet has been edited" notice actually inline with the content would be effective.

Exactly my thought.

Also will all the retweets be edited as well or do you retweet a snapshot?

No one would actually look at that though. You need to cater to the masses or make it exceedingly obvious

It would make it easy to call out anything nefarious, though.

One place I used to frequent solved this by disallowing editing of the original content but allowing the author to add a small annotation after the fact. Doesn't really fix the "correcting typos directly" issue but does allow for clarifications, etc., without the possibility of changing the original meaning that people may have RT/QT/etc.

(You could also extend this to allowing the annotation to be added to a run of text and shove it in the entities object for extra clarity / highlighting.)

Instead of rendering it as hidden or even as an edit history, render it with an "inline diff" (using the kind of algorithm you see Wikipedia do, or GitHub within a line) as a cross-out of the old content and the next content next to it... changing a lot of text like that would be extremely noisy and obvious--to the point where it wouldn't accomplish any evil goal and would also just be generally discouraged by its nature--and yet would fully solve the vast majority of cases that we want to satisfy.

I don't think it needs to be that in-your-face. I believe an inline "this tweet has been edited" link to a revision history or diff would thwart most abuse.

I think it does need to be that in-your-face-obvious. people reading/responding quickly will often fail to check and edit link/button

Plus, having the strikethru + new_text visibly highlighted could enable whole new formats of jokes

I wonder if there are technical issues here? It wouldn't be too surprising if "tweets are immutable" (and therefore safe to aggressively cache) is an assumption baked into a lot of their code.

I could imagine that, though I think there are likely many efficient ways to implement immutable edits, especially if:

a) You're constraining the time-to-edit b) You're constrained to a single edit

But it could be a lot of work to ensure that it's a consistent experience since you'd have to untangle the "cache this thing for-literally-ever" expectations that may exist.

It's not just technical. Jack doesn't want it. https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-wont-get-edit-tweet-...

> Dorsey was unusually direct: “The answer is no,” he says.

> “The reason there's no edit button [and] there hasn't been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS text messaging service," explains Dorsey. "So as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”

Jack really is just a blithering idiot. There are plenty of reasons you could give for not adding this feature, but that one, that's probably the worst.

Why though? It's bad enough when online news sites edit their articles and a later version carries some different information with no or little hint that it was edited.

I mean, yes, that is one good argument for not having an edit button.

But it is not the reason Jack gave.

If you read the next paragraph in the article, he does say basically that.

> Though Twitter has evolved since its SMS days, Dorsey says the static, uneditable nature of posts remains an integral aspect of the platform, as it allows users to retweet and quote tweet others freely without fear that the message they amplified or critiqued could later be altered.

And that is vital. Retweets and quote tweets and replies just fall apart if the parent tweet can be freely edited. Time-limited typo fixing capability is one thing, arbitrary editing is quite another.

But there is a delete button for tweets...

He did expressly state "vibe and feeling."

Edit hurts the vibe but delete doesn't?

And tweets can be 280 characters.

I respect the decision itself if he's trying to uphold a certain feel—but "preserving the vibe of SMS" is pretty weak as far as justifications go.

> It wouldn't be too surprising if "tweets are immutable" (and therefore safe to aggressively cache) is an assumption baked into a lot of their code

Bingo, that's exactly what Twitter Engineers have stated in the past. Example:

https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...

Wondering if you can implement it as a redirect. Instead of editing the original, the tweet redirects to the modified version but the original still shows up as a quote tweet or as a reply (with all replies to the original tweet under that reply)

They did, like a month ago. You gotta pay for it though...

https://ibb.co/S6WNLvt

wut da duck?

It's a feature like Gmail Undo Send. The tweet remains unposted until the edit window has been exited.

They have! With Twitter Blue (Canada + Australia only, $4/month or something) you can edit tweets within a short window.

Imagine - a $4/m edit button. What a joke.

This is one of those cases where the actual feature isn't that hard to make, but it widely depends on what your vision is. If Twitters vision is that a tweet should remain an unchangeable representation of what you said, then it is not just a matter of shipping it.

Given Twitters toxicity it should probably be done with a huge mark "this tweet has changed" and an option to see previous versions just be not be abused.

If only Twitter had a full time CEO. Look at the innovation pace coming out of Square.

One is a useful product people use every day, and earns money.

The other is a hellpit to see who can out-victim and out-woke each other.

…and I like when people aren’t constantly cynical and critical of everything, so thanks for finding something positive here.

Being able to set retention would make me feel better about tweeting.

You can do some of this with third party tools, but it'd be nice to have it built in. I stopped liking Tweets though because it's actually impossible to remove more than 3k old likes. I was eventually able to do so, but it required contacting their DPO office and having them reset the cache each time so I could remove them in batches (entire process of reaching out, getting a response, and iterating took 6weeks-ish).

Limiting quote-tweets would also help people since most of the abuse comes from quote-tweeting rather than replies (which you can already limit).

I'm not twitter famous so I mostly only experience the good aspects of twitter.

If you have a highly curated feed and make an effort to interact pleasantly with in-good-faith people it can be a really great place. It requires aggressive blocking and intentionally not following hostile people though. Some better blocking tools would probably also be helpful (block everyone who liked this tweet, etc.)

I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay $10/month for no ads.

It's cool they have the culture to ship something big like this and decide to pivot - I think that's a pretty good sign.

> block everyone who liked this tweet

It'd be more efficient to have a twitter mode where you can only ever tweet, and not read anything other people tweet.

And also no value?

I'm guessing this is primarily snark, but there are a lot of tweets that are pretty good signal of bad behavior. I'm not talking about some nuanced difference in opinion. For the tweets I'm talking about knocking out everyone that liked it wouldn't be a big deal.

Sure some may use this to craft an echo chamber for themselves, but they're already doing that anyway - and a lot of people 'hate follow' to stir up abuse intentionally to drive traffic. These people wouldn't find this tool valuable because they feed off of the nastiness to drive engagement and grow their audience.

I use likes to auto bookmark tweets to pinboard. Obviously I could figure out another workflow for this. But right now it’s super simple. It would be nice to not “like” tweets I don’t like myself but want to bookmark. Wonder if there is a low code way way around this.

What I do

1. Bookmark instead of liking tweet if info is worth coming back to.

2. Retweet if I totally agree and want to share my view with my followers

3. Add people to different curated lists instead of following them.

Twitter has some excellent feed curation tools but not many people are aware about them.

I second bookmarking. It's bad that they don't export it on the data export, and you can't scroll down after a certain limit, but at least it's private. And they seem to be planning on adding API support for bookmarks, so in the future we can just export it that way

What's the state of Twitter API these days? Can some company really build their own app on top of Twitter feeds?

You certainly can if you're a paying customer of their data services. Source: work for a paying customer.

You can but they heavily limit the amount of access tokens your app can generate, artificially limiting the amount of users your app can have.

> I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay $10/month for no ads

tweetdeck.twitter.com is their first-party client that doesn't have ads (and also gives you an actual chronological feed and some other niceties).

Interestingly, it also never implemented Fleets.

Wow, I completely forgot about tweetdeck. Thanks for the reminder.

> anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting

Have they, like, asked people?

Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the comfortable lurker?

I think there's a real concern on Twitter's end with the conversation being dominated by those who are "good with Twitter". That's a big problem because it's kind of a snoozefest to read tweets by a small in-group that you don't know and that won't interact with you. Twitter serves no purpose without interaction.

Which IMO is why Twitter allowing users to lock their replies is actually damaging to Twitter. Now people just Quote Tweet it instead of replying.

I understand the motivation behind allowing users to lock replies, but you don't need Twitter for that type of content. Twitter sucks for just about anything other than interaction.

What should I use instead of Twitter to just keep up with what people are talking about in my topics of interest?

Twitter also sucks for meaningful interaction, in my opinion.

Yes, they would definitely want more people to Tweet.

Twitter started off as a low-effort life blog, and is now almost entirely a platform for amplifying celebrities and politicians. It definitely needs more normal people tweeting about normal things.

Twitter has loads of normal people tweeting about normal things, but they are down in the very, very long tail, and ~nobody follows them. Into the void they scream.

Exactly. And most importantly those normal people are not profitable. Even collectively, they do not outmatch the top 0.1% of posters in engagement.

They have to change; their market cap is much lower than the other "majors" and actually the usage level (and subscriber base) is lower too.

It's like the inverse of reddit: reddit has a very high Alexa score yet is invisible in the public media; Twitter is discussed endlessly by the nattering nabobs, called before congress etc, yet has trouble monetizing their infamy.

Most companies would envy this amount of "trouble monetizing": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/gross...

True, but compared to their peers they are a laggard.

Also, who's going to feel less anxiety when filming themselves vs. typing?

The idea worked for Instagram, where the aesthetic for regular posts ended up so forced nobody wanted to just make random everyday posts anymore.

For Twitter I didn't see the use, though posting a Fleet does bother people less than spamming, they're too hard to make without ending up ugly.

I'd rather see a change where the search doesn't let you stalk random people by searching for what they posted 3 years ago…

Makes me think (and shudder) about how one could make filters for text. I partially regret saying this and also still curious :-)

Microsoft already did it, it was called Word Art

No no, not for the visual appearance of the text, but rather the filter equivalent of "improving" the content.

Almost like applying a GPT-3 editor to spice up my tweets. I type X tweet and then use GPT-3 or something like that to modify my words/sentences to have more of a Shakespeare or Steve Jobs voice to it.

edit looks as if I found an experiment with GPT-3 to do exactly this: https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1287050253103968257...

Perhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single tweet can ruin your life?

That is the reason most of my colleagues and I have no account there, never had, never will. Same for FB, Instagram, etc., the only exception is LinkedIn where nobody is posting anything.

This is why I purge my old tweets automatically.

Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy tweets.

archive.org scoops up all kinds of tweets - deleting them isn't really a safe way to get rid of it, just fyi

Do those archive let you search for tweets?

sort of - if you search the wayback machine for something like http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the tweets it has - and then a user can download everything and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about, if you are concerned for that kind of thing

Deleting edgy stuff at least gives plausible deniability.

"I don't think like that any more, that's why I deleted the tweet" is a good defence IMO.

The pseudonymous alt is the way to go for this, unless you're mostly using twitter for things related to work. I bet some of your colleagues have alts :)

I tweet and I really enjoy it. I get a ton of value out of it.

But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's an enormous risk for normal people.

tweets can't ruin your life any more than talking out loud anywhere else.

the long searchable record is certainly convenient for digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.

Easy to find "bad tweets", easy to immediately publicize the "bad tweets" to the entire planet almost instantly, easy to have it trusted that the bad thing was said as the twitter timestamp exists and a bunch of trusted people talking about a screenshot if you delete it confirms it's genuine, not to mention most people don't use twitter imaging themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation, the dynamic is pretty different.

>most people don't use twitter [imagining?] themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation

and there's the problem.

like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect its power and follow some basic safety rules.

Yup. I mentioned this in another comment but one of the key problems is the discrepancy between the impact tweets really have, and the ease with which Twitter allows you to post them.

Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button.

In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your full name and face attached to it. It has the potential to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on it for the rest of your professional life. So tread carefully.

The searchable digital record is the key difference. Statements out loud to one or more people are often: A) tailored to that audience, B) carry much more context than a piece of text on a screen, and C) are a way of growing and exploring new ideas without the commitment of recording them to an easily searchable record for the rest of time. The long-term ramifications of saying something stupid in a conversation that isn't recorded are far less severe than they would be if every word you said was recorded and searchable forever.

A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a publication of record with your name and face attached to it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years ago learned that lesson the hard way.

your first point (tweeting is as safe as talking) is entirely invalidated by your second (long searchable record helps find statements to criticize people for)

as for your third point, undocumented public speech (no audio or video recordings and no effective note taking) is vastly different from creating public documents (anything on the open internet).

You're being downvoted, presumably because of the idea that "if you don't say anything stupid, you'll be fine." And yet acceptably edgy jokes from 10 years ago can easily become dumpster fires of controversy today. There's simply no reason to engage in it unless you treat every social media post as something you would say to all future employers. Including private chats.

EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.

This right here is why I just lurk on social media.

There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today.

Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there.

With social media, the only way to win is not to play.

Completely agree.

The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook.

A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing.

Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...

Please point to one person whose life was ruined from a single tweet, and who didn't deserve it.

Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".

David Shor - he was impulsively fired by his firm last June for just a tweet linking to academic research (I think by a black academic) that argued that violent protests following the MLK assassination reduced the share of Democratic support in the following presidential election, while non-violent protests increase Democratic support: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow.... David Shor is a committed socialist and Democratic data scientist, but that was not enough to protect him from accusations of racism in the post-George-Floyd period.

I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or implying anything negative about minorities.

In the responses I read through on twitter, no one accused him of racism. People were upset that in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes, which is pretty insensitive. Also, just like you said, he's doing fine now.

The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.

I would never consider getting fired over a tweet as a trivial matter, but he is fortunate to be doing well.

Who do you think was properly fired/ostracized for tweets?

The Rosanne thing was pretty great.

https://time.com/5294313/roseanne-cancelled-abc/

Perhaps "life ruining" is an exaggeration but losing your job for discussing the effectiveness of different protest tactics is an insane knee-jerk reaction made by the people who fired him. He clearly agreed with the movement and ostensibly wanted to help it be as effective as possible.

> in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes

That's a baseless statement. I would argue that caring about getting votes means he cared about trying to actually help the movement capitalize on its energy at a critical moment. Right or wrong, if people can't even discuss data-driven strategies for your movement without being shamed and ostracized, your movement is dead in the water.

I do agree your example appears wild. Any sort of repercussions no less losing your job is crazy for that. However, that isn’t life ruining if he’s fine after the firing. The OP and others before were talking about life ruining.

I’d consider something like this life ruining:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/03/29/adam-smith-c...

A mean spirited yet relatively insignificant video berating a low level employee for the company/owners bigoted views. The guy ends up losing his job and allegedly can’t get another job for years.

Chik-Filla or whatever is a shit company, but a well paid CFO filming themselves being a shithead to some minimum wage employee is pretty god damn horrific.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg-jzlWcc0E

Dude outed himself as a massive shitbag, so I'm going to lean on the side of "he deserved it". What has he done to redeem himself since then? The name makes it pretty hard to search for updates.

Don’t know. The point of bringing that up is that his life got ruined or close to it. Not the examples being brought up where “cancelling” was a minor life event.

> Twitter is great when it comes to transparency

Are you kidding? This is an incredibly opaque and user-hostile company.

edit: I am one of the moderators of /r/Twitter on Reddit. Come look at my subreddit if you want a feel for where my opinion is being drawn from. This company is in absolutely no way transparent.

I’m guessing the person you’re replying to meant that Twitter’s engineering department is transparent.

I don't know, it just kind of came across as being an astroturfed statement.

> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting...

That makes sense in retrospect. I have a twitter account but have only used it a handful of times when it was the only way to complain to a company (!). I read tweets only when someone links to them.

Perhaps something even more lightweight would have attracted me but I'd never even heard of this product.

It's a difficult problem to publicize an addition to a service to those non-users who aren't actively looking for features.

> It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed.

Every failure we can learn from is one which we can avoid for our self. Hence in the startup ecosystem, 'What not to do' is more valuable than 'What to do' but those who are new to the game flock to those selling the latter because 'they tell what one wants to hear'.

The recent #buildinpublic trend is showing some promise. I started my first buildinpublic project recently, A platform to validate minimum viable product but it failed the meta validation and I've detailed the reasons in the twitter thread[1].

But I've noticed that much of the building in public ecosystem is focused upon nocode, Especially flooded with notion related projects. I haven't used it, But I presume the reason is because majority of the people who are watching the #buildinpublic threads are non-coders and are looking to learn how a project is built.

[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/13994004552858542...

I didn't even know about "Fleets", maybe that was part of the problem.

Yeah. I’ve heard the same from a few friends/acquaintances who aren’t into tech too much but use Twitter.

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