Twitter’s Root Injustice | Hacker News Reader

Twitter’s Root Injustice

techcrunch.com

23 pointsKhalilK16 comments

Nobody I follow on Twitter thinks like this. The idea of a Twitter account having some intrinsic social capital baffles me. The "old" Twitter accounts? The "new" Twitter accounts?

I follow Daniel J. Bernstein (@hashbreaker, a relatively new account) because he's Daniel J. Bernstein. I am interested in what DJB has to say.

I am in conversations with other people who are interested in what DJB has to say. We comment on the same threads. They wind up in my feed. Not infrequently, one of those people will say something interesting. I will click the "follow" button. Others do the same. Their follower count grows.

In what other way could this system meaningfully work? Why on earth would I follow someone because of their Twitter stats? What do I care how Twitter manages those stats? If you want a chance to be heard, say something interesting.

This is kinda like saying people with more contacts in their cell phones have more social capital, and the carrier should address that.

Whether this is a problem is debatable, but referring to it as 'Injustice' is entitled and inappropriately hyperbolic.

Injustice: "a quality relating to unfairness or undeserved outcomes. The term may be applied in reference to a particular event or situation, or to a larger status quo. In Western philosophy and jurisprudence, injustice is very commonly, but not always, defined as either the absence or the opposite of justice."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injustice

Justice "is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, equity and fairness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice

An entitlement "is a guarantee of access to something, such as to welfare benefits, based on established rights or by legislation. A "right" is itself an entitlement associated with a moral or social principle"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

Criticizing an inherently moral concept on the grounds of a claim to morality is ... somewhere between irrational and ignorant.

Next paragraph:

In a casual sense, the term "entitlement" refers to a notion or belief that one (or oneself) has a right to some particular reward or benefit— if given without deeper legal or principled cause, the term is often given with pejorative connotation (e.g. a "sense of entitlement").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

It does but as a secondary sense. I still find the criticism voiced wanting.

First-mover advantage is a characteristic of a great many systems. Disrupting that, out of concerns for justice or merely to provide a more compelling reason for newcomers to make use of a service or tool, is an interesting and ongoing challenge.

Another approach is to randomly present new content to users. Google's attempted numerous hacks to both solve the "empty streams" problem and break out of filter bubbles at G+, though many of these have been less than satisfactory. The "What's Hot" feature (now deprecated to "Explore") had the typical problems of juvenilia and vapidity, as well as the problem for those whose posts were promoted to it of attracting vast amounts of generally unwanted attention, to the extent that people were begging not to have posts featured.

It's not a specific problem of Twitter, there's a challenge in new-content discovery and promotion generally. I'm not sure that the "active users" hack is a sufficient fix. I do feel that leveraging both technical (e.g., algorithmically determined ratings) and social (FOAF type recommendations) tends to produce more useful results.

This is the author of the post. would love to take any questions.

You make some very interesting observations. I'm pretty sure the folks at Twitter spend a LOT of time working on user engagement and solving the signal vs noise problem in recommendations etc. What's been their response so far when you reached out to them? I would try to reach out to the people trying to solve this problem (developers) instead of to management first, in case it's not a matter of decision making but a more of an algorithmic problem.

Why would everyone on Twitter have imperial ambitions?

The world operates as an unregulated market for social capital. To blame Twitter for that is a little absurd.

There are plenty of institutions in the world (the US Congress, Hacker News) that are markets for social capital with a design that orients itself towards a particular contributor. Blaming them for the right things is how they become better intuitions.

Twitter (and other technical platforms) afford technical and other means of addressing the lack of regulation. Actually, so does the real world, come to think of it.

Social capital is still capital. If social capital is what draws users to Twitter, then Twitter's user engagement as a whole determines the value of its shares. If new users aren't able to gain that capital through Twitter, then Twitter's userbase will begin to stagnate, and its stock value will drop. Regardless of who's to "blame", this is undeniably a real problem.

I think that's a problem with an inter-networked world in general. Time and attention is finite, and there are now many sites, apps, and people competing for that attention. What you describe is every as relevant for aspiring YouTubers, bloggers, etc.

I agree that Twitter is included in that overarching problem, but I don't see it as their creation, and I'm not sure what they can do about it. (Facebook is in an easier position, being oriented primarily around family and friends, even though every brand on Earth also has a Facebook page.)

I wasn't talking about a general problem with capitalism. I'm saying that this is a unique problem that Twitter as a company has to face, for the reasons the article describes.

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