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Comment by talideon | Hacker News Reader

It's _really_ easy to disempower extremists.

(a) Linear timeline.

(b) Stop injecting stuff into people's timelines.

(d) Add a cooldown period on tweets: they're not visible for this period, and they can still be edited during it. Editing a tweet resets the cooldown period.

The problem with all this is that it drives down "engagement".

Addendum:

(e) Make it possible to prevent retweets (including quote retweets) from certain accounts you follow from showing up on your timeline. There are certain people you might like who retweet effluent, and you don't want that effluent going straight into your eyeballs.

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I like your thinking, this is the correct direction. As cherry on top I'd remove the retweet button entirely or severely rate-limit it.

For example, you can only retweet so many times per day (budget). Only after a tweet is a certain age (slow down). Tweets need a negative feedback option (thumbs down) so that poorly appreciated tweets do not spread further, or less so. Yet of course done in a way where downvoting isn't misused, which is hard.

Remove quote tweets as it's only used to talk AT people behind their back to one's own followers. Join the main thread if you have something to say.

Detect screenshotted tweets as this too is only used to weaponize conversations and normalizes obsessively digging for dirt. When such screenshots are overused, consider rate-limiting the tweet or the entire account.

Similarly, punish false reports. When continuously reporting tweets that do not break any objective rule, take the ability to report away and rate limit the account.

In general, detect mob patterns where out of the blue at breakneck speed you see mass negative actions, and rate limit it. Put out the fire.

I don't expect much of this to happen, but one can dream. As for engagement, the current type of engagement is exactly the problem with Twitter.

I agree with--and have advocated for the same things as--your parent post, but your post is filled with things that are effectively impossible to implement (analyzing screenshots to prevent someone from even indirectly linking to a tweet?!) in an attempt to limit forms of speech (well, with the exception of the report button... but I think if you fix things correctly the report button could and should simply be removed entirely) instead of making platform changes that happen to make the world more pleasant. I sincerely hope you are never given power over a medium of discourse :(.

> The problem with all this is that it drives down "engagement".

Pretty sure that this is literally the reason he argues Twitter needs to be privately held in order to improve it. As long as Twitter is beholden to the addiction of engagement at any cost, it cannot improve.

> (c) Hide like and retweet counts from anyone but the person who made the tweet

Honestly - hide them full stop. From everyone. I enjoy using Twitter, but I dislike how my small brain can be very unhealthily obsessed with those numbers.

I feel the same way about the little score thing here on HN. I give that number way too much attention.

(f) Allow people to easily get read-only API access for their own clients, and make the firehose more accessible

Add a downvote button so the rabid folks of either extreme will downvote each other into oblivion.

No, because voting in the form of likes and retweets are part of the problem.

The issue is about what is rewarded by the algorithm in terms of increased visibility. A downvote could act to reduce visibility, rather than as another dimension to engagement that adds to visibility. This could fix the incentive people have to post politically extreme content.

My worry with this is that it snowballs the hivemind effect.

If downvotes reduce visibility and Twitter is composed of 60% A's and 40% B's, I will expect to see vastly more A content than B content, since the like-to-dislike ratios will differ by a factor of more than 2 (over twice as much A content).

In my mind, Reddit is a prime demonstration that voting to say "I find this content objectionable" and voting to say "I disagree with this content" are often indistinguishable.

Downvoting is to desperately needed that Twitter users invented their own way: a ratio. To those that don't know, an unpopular tweet will have many more comments than likes, which is considered downvoting.

Thanks for explaining. I always thought it was that a reply to the comment got more likes than the main comment.

It's also that. In general, getting "ratiod" is when two metrics about any given online posting have a ratio that is on the (perceived) wrong side of 1.

It was added like two weeks ago.

> Add a downvote button so the rabid folks of either extreme will downvote each other into oblivion.

Downvoting just adds fuel to the fire. It's a classic technical "solution" to a social problem. We've known it doesn't work since the early 2000s, but people keep trying it because it's cheap.

Works pretty well on Reddit.

It's not perfect, but reddit threads sorted by "best" are a sight better than threads sorted by "new".

Upvotes-only wouldn't get you the same effect, since "best" is about the ratio.

Honestly twitter should implement downvotes and just copy reddit's thread-sorting system verbatim.

Finally, I swear I saw downvotes on the Twitter app some time in the last few months. Unless it was an April fools joke, it was briefly a real feature! What happened?

> Works pretty well on Reddit.

Reddit doesn't actually work that well, and it only works as well as it does because of human moderation outsourced to people volunteering for a for-profit company.

> Finally, I swear I saw downvotes on the Twitter app some time in the last few months. Unless it was an April fools joke, it was briefly a real feature! What happened?

They did some A/B tests. I don't use Twitter, but it was in the news.

Re: (e), you can already turn off retweets from accounts you follow. It doesn't hide quote retweets, though that hasn't been too much of an issue in my experience.

As long as you allow so-called extremists to speak, they will get their message out there and will convert more people to their politics.

This also kills the Twitter. There is a reason social media evolved this way. This is what gets the most engagement/users.

(a) Require login

(b) Present each person with the fake reality that is least likely to offend them

(a) Requiring login would reduce what little utility Twitter has.

(b) That's impossible, but a linear timeline with people who I actually know comes close.

It was somewhat tongue in cheek, but roughly what Facebook seems to be doing.

(b) sounds like the kind of thing The Guardian claims radicalised people and got Trump elected.

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