To counter the downvotes: yes, Reddit can be a good forum for productive dialogue. It depends on the subreddit you're on—there are some subs (especially smaller and/or ones with heavy, thoughtful moderation) that are real gems.
I found it somewhat ironic at the downvotes considering the lowering in quality of HN comments I've observed over the past couple years, coming across comments in more frequency that remind me of stereotypical Reddit one-liners and off-the-cuff remarks (not true for all subs but it is a common perception), in some threads even being among the highest rated where previously they would be looked down upon.
Thinking back it coincides somewhere around the same time HN improved their mobile viewing experience. Unsure if it's related but does feel HN reached some wider audience, or at least has a broader acceptance of varying levels of quality for comments.
I don't think we should confuse lack of willingness to read long form text on the Internet as a lapse in education of those people. A lot of people don't have time or the interest. I'm not sure if I qualify, but I'm a third year university student and all I've learned is that the Internet is tiring, and responding in detail will guarantee people don't read your comment.
The amount of things discussed in philosophy and science journals which people aren't aware of is mind-boggling, to the point where every argument online takes place not taking into account any research and resorting to pure speculation and fans of each speculative hypothesis (stated as fact of course) up/downvoting. This happens on Reddit and HN despite it being more visible on Twitter and such. But even I don't have the time to look up the research on any given topic I want to care about.
>I don't think we should confuse lack of willingness to read long form text on the Internet as a lapse in education of those people. A lot of people don't have time or the interest. I'm not sure if I qualify, but I'm a third year university student and all I've learned is that the Internet is tiring, and responding in detail will guarantee people don't read your comment
For some things, absolutely (after all 99% on the internet is crap). But if one can never do it, but can, e.g. spend 3 hours checking celebrity gossip, then there's a problem!
I don't see why internet strangers think their walls of text are owed eyeballs. Time is short, the amount of content on the internet is near-infinite, much of that content is just noise, and without a very serious assumption that a source is both trustworthy and informative you'd be better off discarding it and moving on.
Reading things thoroughly takes time, and time is money. Scientists are paid to read the current literature on their field. Government and corporate analysts are paid to collect data and provide synthetic memos to executives. Journalists are paid to read sources as a background to their story. If you want me to read your wall of text, you either have to convince me that you are worth reading (through your reputation) or pay me to do it.
HN is indeed an exception in that I find the site to be a kind of guarantee that most of users are well-versed in tech topics and thus have something interesting to say. In that sense the whole website provides a reputation to its users. Twitter has no such guarantee.
If it required you to make arguments in the form of First Order Logic statements and then did automated validation of them, then I would use it. I'll grant this is probably a niche use case. With the power of modern automated reasoning, and maybe automated fallacy detection, it seems a shame not to use that. Computer assisted argumentation would be a great forum feature.
That makes no sense in practice. The reasoning you employ on a day to day basis is completely outside the realm of what you propose. Realistic everyday reasoning is too complex; it is not satisfactorily represented by first-order logic.
Also, even mathematical proofs are cumbersome to state in a purely formal way. Moreover, many of our arguments hinge more on things like accuracy of assumptions, informal inferences, disagreement on "axioms" and goals, etc, not on formal validity of arguments.
I've always thought something like this would be a better way to approach public discussions, and their implementation seems to be fairly decent so far. There doesn't seem to be a whole bunch of activity yet, and not really much free style discussion under the few points I browsed, do you happen to know a particularly busy topic one could look at?
This doesn't happen. Most of the time people either:
1. post something where you can understand what they mean but they didn't spend the time (not that you should have to) to refine the point and people are pedantic
2. post something so absurd that has no basis in reality.
I agree that the end result is screaming at each other but nobody is on Twitter to engage in debates in the first place. Nobody can present a valid discussion that was hampered in any serious way by twitter's character limit.
In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication. Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.
I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing. That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong. What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting, which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
For example, I'll reformat above text to fit into 280 character buckets, which actually won't even be a good aproximation of what I would have written on Twitter, since I refelected on the text, restructuring it and editing it through out. Here it goes:
> In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication.
> Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.
> I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing.
> That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong.
> What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting...
> ... which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
By reading that, you can tell that the rhythm of the text doesn't match the rhythm of the divisions. The text is too wordy for the constraints, sentences too long. Last sentence had to be cut into two paragraphs. It's almost giving you indigestion, a feeling like you're taking too large bites too fast.
That's a radical departure from their 2015 stance[0]: “The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.”
I wonder when they're going to start testing this and what the results are. I hope they share what they learn, this could be an interesting experiment given how core a part of Twitter the like/favorite button has always been!
But removing a feature doesn't have the same weight as adding a new one. Most probably the people that got accustomed to it will be very vocal about the removal, while nobody ever cries over a new feature they don't like, they just not use it.
Ah, I basically only use the Android app, and this is hidden under the button that one expects would launch the confusing and awful Android sharing dialog.
I recommend to use a real bookmarking service like Kozmos (https://getkozmos.com) or Pocket instead of Twitter’s bookmarking tool. You can’t search and organize anything on Twitter, and you’ll lose them when you delete your account like I did.
P.s: I’m the founder of Kozmos, but honestly would promote any bookmarking service over Twitter features.
is that all twitter is now? a debate site? Starring items has been a stample of both bookmarking content, as well as showing appreciation for anything on the platform.
But as well as when they started merging liked posts into the content feed on the main apps, it did remove the critical thing if it being an option for feedback to a post, without sharing the content to your own timeline (a retweet).
I don't understand any logic behind this change at all, and if there is, there's a paywall. But twitter is for everything, not just politics. If you're using politics to drive your platform, it's a shitshow for anyone else that uses the platform for more recreational purposes
> Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.
Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of appreciation. I do that a lot.
I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone who actually tweets though.
If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion. Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.
Whether this is good or bad, I think it's cool that Twitter are still willing to make profound changes to their service. The last was switching from 140 to 280 chars. Kudos!
I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine.
Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.
And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.
They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.
People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.
Because you have to make assumptions when you only have 140 characters to get an idea through. And yes, I know the limit has been relaxed, but that doesn't change the habit.
> Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.
Done well and taken in context, it's funny?
Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example.
Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects.
Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.
Patton Oswalt did a series of tweets that were designed to be taken out of context - they made a clever point about that. Of course, that didn't stop him from continuing to use Twitter prolifically, so perhaps he missed his own point, or at least yours.
The simple answer to this problem has been clear for awhile: Make responses to quote tweets opaque to the original author.
1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging
2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse
3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote
3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all.
There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.
It might improve things marginally but at this point it's just an arm's race. Furthermore the people who will manage to work around these limitations will also probably be the more radicalized fringe of the community who are probably the most problematic one as well. It will deter the more moderate and give a larger audience to the radicalized.
Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.
I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them...
That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
"people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion".
I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.
I don't see how it has been "clear for a while" that this is the solution to all of twitter's problems.
> 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
The problem of online harassment is not (mainly) that the service UI becomes cumbersome to use for the victim. It's that everyone else can observe they are harassed and the victim loses control over their online presence. Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed.
>> "Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed."
There's a perspective where this is a good thing, but I think I know where you're coming from. I've seen people on the receiving end of these attacks who say they still want to know about it so they know about any tangible threats.
It could be argued though that when it's known that the quote-tweeted person won't see replies to the quoting tweet, there's no point for a harasser to make threats that won't be received.
I’d argue a fair number of people want to know what people are saying about them, it seems like instinct almost. So does it have any affect at that point if everyone knows everyone will look?
Generally, I'm always wary of "out of sight, out of mind" type solutions - for any kind of problem. In this particular case, this assumes harrassers only want the original author to know (and even then are interested in the actual outcome of their message).
I think the "shitstorm" dynamics are more complex and there are different motivations for people to take part in one. E.g., it could be simple venting, virtue singalling to peers in your brigade or you sharing the tweet to others in your circle - nothing that needs any perticipation by the original author.
In extreme cases, an author might not realize what is going on until they find outraged articles about themselves in the news.
See the comparable problem of cyberbullying for an example. There, it's often completely irrelevant whether or not a victim knows about the messages that are written about them. Indeed, they can be bullied on online platforms where they don't even have an account. All that is required is for participants in the bullying to know how to access the messages.
Of course, harrassing PMs are a different issue. Here, you can be sure the messages are exclusively directed towards the author and the harm is being done by having the author read them. Blocking those kind of messages would stop the bullying action itself and could work. But then again, this is not so much different from the oldfashioned blocking we already have.
I think there are certainly scenarios where this would be useful and preferable, but there is a quote-tweet use case for wanting to mention something to the people you follow but add your own support or opinion in good faith - it allows you to comment with at least a little context.
But this is probably me trying to salvage twitter for the non-toxic purposes and its probably a losing battle. The fact that what you propose is necessary is a terrible state of affairs.
I just wish someone else would come along and eat their lunch already.
If I'm not mistaken, aren't notifications on a quoted tweeted already muted for the quoted user? That is, the user sees the quoted tweet, but isn't notified with each reply/like of the quoted tweet? Just tested it on my own account but maybe I've changed a default at some point.
That might be the simple answer for Twitter, but the simple answer for everyone else is to avoid Twitter. It should be clear thst broadcasting yourself thst way is inherently unwise in most cases, and that’s even before you add in the toxic community and “engagement first” platform.
It doesn't help much if I avoid Twitter, when all the major news media outlets think that Twitterers are the vox populi, and use it to source their articles.
The corollary is to avoid any source of “news” which does that. Stick to written media in most cases, avoid lifestyle pieces and minimize your exposure to politics. When possible go for primary sources on foreign affairs and cross-reference several viewpoints. Most of all don’t spend too much time with the news, especially the “major” outlets because they’re just poison.
this point was made in, of all places, an episode of Parks & Recreation in 2012 where the moderator at a political debate has to read out a typo-filled question posed to the candidates, and remarks mockingly "and this question is from Twitter, which is something we are apparently doing now".
In the notification settings there are advanced filters to remove notifications from accounts that you don't follow, don't follow you, new accounts, accounts that have unconfirmed contact information. I don't know any other platform that offers so much control. I have been lucky to never experience this type of abuse but if I were under attack I would apply advanced filters until the storm passes. Twitter could certainly do better (and could take more of a stand against cut and dry abuse), but in the meantime there are tools in the hands of users today to take control of unwanted notifications.
Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest.
Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :)
Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously.
How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it.
Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)
One commonality is that eberything you mentioned is a site that specifically gathers people around a common topic/interest. Twitter puts everything together, so the tweets from the hardware hackers I follow are mixed in together with joke accounts. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with all social media, I just don't understand why we haven't figured out anything better than usenet for keeping interests separated.
Completely agree. The day they decided to go with ads there was no coming back. It's a public company now and they have an obligation towards their shareholders. Ads -> grabbing eyeballs -> evoking reactions. It's quite impossible to balance the interests of your customers(advertisers)vis users if one of them is not paying. They are too far along to do that.
For a long time i thought the idea that my reply, not a quote, just a reply, to a tweet gets posted to my main timeline / follower's timelines...is also a bad idea, but I guess this also was designed for 'engagement' too
Your followers will only see your replies if they also follow the account to which you're replying or if someone they follow retweets the parent or your reply. Otherwise, users will have to visit your profile and slide over to the Tweets & Replies tab.
sure it can. the higher the effort the better. they should remove retweets too. i cant remember how many people i have unfollowed because they keep retweeting their political nonsense.
(in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)
You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter. My experience is completely different. I don't follow people engaging in these battles and I don't post things that would be an engagement. It really is smooth sailing from there. Or, in the words of Steve Jobs:
"You're holding it wrong."
I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.
As others already have mentioned, there are actual bookmarks in Twitter, that is not the "like" button (click the share button in the Android app, for example)
Maybe, but that feature is pretty new and it doesn't even show up on the Desktop site. I've never even heard of it until now. I've been using the "like" Button for bookmarks since forever. Those are my bookmarks.
You can access your bookmarks on the desktop by going to http://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks, but it really doesn't make sense to me that they're not integrated into the non-mobile page. I often bookmark things because I want to read them a) later or b) on a bigger screen. Currently, only the first use case is supported by Twitter.
Upvoted - not sure why a perfectly reasonable comment is greyed out. My experience is same as yours - I only follow data scientists and data visualization specialists and my experience is absolutely brilliant. I also discovered some really great technical posts on R using Twitter.
"You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter."
Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.
It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
> Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.
Then unfollow the guy. Seriously, it's that simple. You have the power to curate your own experience, that's my point.
> It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative.
Unfollow
I can't tell you how to cure your favorite subcultures of their bullshit, I'm telling you how to have a pleasant experience on Twitter. If that means your Twitter timeline becomes emptied, you'll have to find new people to follow.
> We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
No, that's actually just what your slice of "society" is like. Mine isn't like that, because I curate it not to be like that.
Twitter is built short-burst/high-speed communication - the kind that works great for machines but not for humans.
The result is that it has turned the world into one massive Medieval village; flash-spreading of rumours, hysteria, bigotry in-between maniacally virtue-signalling and choir preaching.
Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether.
Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.
I believe visible scores are the only reason for mob mentality. Take away the pluses or the minuses and the numbers attached to them and heard mentality weakens. You still have some attachment from surroundings opinions but to a much lesser extent. At that point the behavior shifts from micro to macro, from a single post to the whole platform. HN is the perfect example of this.
>Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?
Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.
I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.
I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.
I’ve always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to update. I get that the voting system of get to the top is toxic and typically produces poor content but it does seem to work to an extent (for example HN).
I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.
What if HN didn’t show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on invisible votes? I wonder if a system that’s more simple like that would carry over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?
The trouble is, how often do you see a Reddit discussion show up in a Google search with helpful information? This is a rarity for me, and I don't think it has anything to do with how Google sorts results. The same voting system prioritizes pithy memes and snark comments over helpful discussion. While you might have to wait longer, I would argue that you are far better off asking a question on a dedicated forum vs. a subreddit. Fora have their own problems, but voting systems typically seem to encourage low quality content to gather imaginary points, hacker news is the only site with voting I've seen that stays tolerable.
>I’ve always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to update.
Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts per day.
The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.
Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.
As far as the high profile sites are concerned, civil discussion is dead.
Twitter is full of hatred. People who disagree with you will threaten you and try to publicly shame you. Someone takes something out of context, then shares it with hundreds/thousands of other like-minded people and attempts to get them all to target you.
Facebook is full of ignorance. Doesn't matter what you say, some ill informed person will speak over you and refute your points. FB is absolutely the worst for this. The public posts about controversial issues is loaded with ignorant people spouting nonsense over others.
Reddit is full of downvote and report abusers. If someone disagrees with you, they and their friends will downvote your comment until it collapses due to the negative vote threshold. The more extremist ones will report every single thing you say and attempt to get you banned.
These sites also have no recourse for abuse. Once you are banned, it is next to impossible to get it overturned.
I find Twitter delightful again but I needed the following settings:
Media Preview: Off
Reduced Motion: On
Video Autoplay: Never
Increased Contrast: On
I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.
This makes a lot of sense. Someone had earlier posted about the design of Mastodon which uses boosts instead of Retweet Quote. I think the issues are inherently with design. It is a good first step towards that direction.
Is the tool, any tool, guilty for its misuse then? It’s always the people, never the tool. It’s you too, if you are unable to make your Twitter the useful environment you want.
Seems like a lot of people only see the rage storm side of twitter. Most of my stream was peaceful. That said I had the intense joy to get some quote-retweet angst, it's at best half-pleasant.
Not sure about likes but Twitter without retweets is a much better place. The people I follow rarely say something with their own voice, and I was tired of the "outrage" tweets for every new social issue. my feed is not much quieter, and when my Tweeps do say something, I pay attention.
Discovery works fine if you can view the friend feed of your favorite artist manually, without it showing up in your friend feed. Livejournal worked like that for many years and there was a ton of discovery happening. In fact I much prefer the livejournal model, where you can post your own content or write comments on other people's content, but cannot like/share/retweet. People whose only contribution is point and grunt shouldn't be allowed to contribute, they only make the site worse for everyone.
True. It's why I'm happy they allow it per-user. Some users retweet great stuff, it's the political/social outrage of the day I'd rather not have rammed down my throat every day (I'm perfectly happy with pulling my doom and gloom)
People retweeted things before retweets were an official feature, ie ".RT <quote they are retweeting>". Twitter adding retweets was something the community wanted.
The fav button was a useful tool back when it meant "fav" as in "bookmark" and not "like". Maybe they should go back to that? I know they've recently added a "bookmark" button as well, but I hope they don't keep it hidden the way it is now.
On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and follow your friends. They shouldn't screw it just to cater to a certain part of their user base.
+1. I've since switched (grudgingly) to sending myself DM's of Tweets that I want to "save for later". A poor substitute, but easy to reach for from the UI.
Yep. It was kind of fun when they first added it, but now it is overused to the point where nearly every post has a heart sign, angry/sad face, etc. Even when there is hardly anything to love or be angry or sad about. I became so tired of it that I modified my F.B. Purity add-on to just not show them to me anymore.
Pretty much. Their design isn't just bad, it's perfectly bad.
No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags, emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.)
People always underestimate the extent to which UI design and content structure drive communication tone. Sure, just because some website is messy doesn't mean it will immediate make everyone a jerk, but this stuff has cumulative effect. As a way of example: try to write a long paper letter to someone by hand. You will immediately see how that changes the way you think.
Also, people should check out Jaron Lanier's talks on why everyone should delete their social media accounts. He doesn't talk about UI, but he makes some great points about economic incentives, behaviorism and emergent properties of ad-driven online economies.
I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality -- I rarely find myself bumping into the limit, and I find that threaded tweets can read as well as short articles. A good use of the format can be found in the BBC's "Anatomy of a Killing" investigation into a military killing in Cameroon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709
I enjoy and have learned more from the discussions on HN than on any other platform. But what Twitter lacks in quality it more than makes up for in diversity and quantity. There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk to randos in Indiana and India all in the same thread. As crappy as the discussions can get, I have a hard time imagining how much better any such service could be without making tradeoffs on audience and ease of engagement. Mastodon, for example, seems to have limited scope and scale inextricable in its design. Which is not to say that that makes it a worser service -- just one that is inherently different from Twitter's model.
>I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality
280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty.
> There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk
In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an anthill.
If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions online.
I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.
To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts.
You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress.
The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.
Most of the benefits you ascribe to Twitter aren't exclusive, are far more likely to take place on other media and are, in fact, slowly being eroded by the global and noisy nature of Twitter/Facebook.
On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over Tesla because he was on Twitter.
I agree Twitter's low-friction nature has led to reckless and/or inappropriate usage -- Musk isn't even the most egregious case by far, compared to President Trump using Twitter (instead of the traditional longform mediums) to disseminate his thoughts, or colossal mistakes by people like Rep. Anthony Weiner.
But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in their respective categories.
USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product
TWITTER: likes are now florps
USERS: what
TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"
(The irony is that likes used to have a clear, simple use: bookmark something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.
Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)
Here's what I'm thinking when companies remove votes or scores or whatever: They're just hiding the problem. Like, people still like the stuff, it's just no longer tracked. They sure as hell won't stop tracking views or whatever. Which are likely (heh) just a factor removed from "likes".
The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enough.
This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent post traffic? It's tough. Even something that has a hyperfocused topic (e.g. a subreddit for dogs with sunglasses riding skateboards) will have naysayers of what should and shouldn't be allowed. Someone posts a pic of a dog. It doesn't have sunglasses, but it does have on yellow-tinted glasses for reducing eye-strain on monitor. Oh and it's not riding a skateboard. This dog is on a self-balancing scooter.
Most of your users won't care. They'll enjoy the content. Someone chimes in that the sub or forum is no longer pure. The content is similar, but it's off-topic. The board is going to devolve into just pics of dogs (which is a legitimate concern). Other people defend that the board needs content, and that computer glasses and a scooter is similar enough to be inclusive. So where do you plant you flag? Will there be a zero-tolerance policy for anything that isn't a dog wearing sunglasses riding a skateboard (OMG mods are literally Nazis!!!), do you allow users to flag posts for review on a case-by-case basis (need more mods), or do you relax the content restriction (this board is trash since it lost its focus!)?
Twitter has no focused topic. The platform is for anyone to communicate whatever they want within reason. With disparate cultures than span every corner of the globe, how do you stop the problem from existing in the first place? Not everyone has the tolerance for scathing, brutal honesty. How do you draw the line between that and bullying? How do you differentiate between well-intended people who are misinformed and people spouting propaganda? I don't have the answer, but my time moderating forums about topics that have no impact on society has taught me that it's pretty much impossible to create a perfect platform that appeases everyone.
>This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent post traffic?
I actually have! I definitely don't think there's currently a good solution to this problem. But removing likes is ridiculous, too!
>> "Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT."
There's a furry eSports person (https://twitter.com/SonicFox5000) who likes a lot of gay furry porn on his main account. Many people were surprised when Twitter started doing this.
That's exactly how I use likes it's an archive of all the cool art I've seen so I can go look again later! Guess I'll finally go find a plugin or tamper monkey script to download them now since twitters interface makes it impossible to right click save images if there's more than one image in a post?
Really 90% of twitter for me is either liking great art or getting depressed by the news/US politics. Take away the art and twitter gets a lot less appealing.
My first thought is to just modify the CSS on the next and previous divs that are pasted over the pictures in galleries to shrink them so I can just do the normal right click. That's the actual issue the picture isn't the top element so right click doesn't work. Till now I've been doing basically what it DOM Inspector looks like using Chrome's inspect element. It's a bit annoying to have to do every time though.
I disagree that Likes had that "clear, simple use" case. I for one didn't use it as a bookmark, simply because I used it so often for the other case you cite: "telling the poster that you liked it" -- including for tweets that were relatively trivial: e.g. "I appreciate that you replied to my tweet".
I follow several thousand users so I guess the timeline algorithm doesn't bother showing me Liked activity. However, I do see "[some user] and 5 others liked this tweet" when I do a search for tweets, and I find that note to be more helpful than not, to be honest.
My curated collection of "likes" is one of my most valued possessions. 1000+ tweets that each made me laugh or smile or think in a powerful enough and unique enough way that I needed to save it. And I've spent a lot of time enjoying them after the fact. I wrote a slack command to show me a random one whenever I need to be picked up.
Granted, those 1000 tweets came buried in a lot of noise, but the diamonds on Twitter make it not only worthwhile but by far my favorite social network or online experience.
Of course, that's despite everything Twitter has done in the last several years and not because of it. Like a lot of Google products it's attracted that air of frequently making you believe they must not actually use it themselves.
Please don't do that. Repetition lowers the signal/noise ratio of conversation and the last thing we need here is people repeating the same things over and over.
1. You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters.
2. Isn't a "like"/upvote tool necessary for debates? There isn't a formal judge to rate comments/arguments. Who "wins" is decided by the (very) biased community. This is obviously a bad idea as most communities aren't open to unpopular ideas. However, if you trust the community as a whole you can expect general consensus about sensitive topics such as gay rights, immigration etc.
If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.
I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system because of the said biased 'judges' - removing the like functionality doesn't seem like an improvement though.
I've seen some interesting uses of this where eg. liking a specific Westworld tweet would have them message you about new episodes, and liking an Apple event ad will have them message you when it's about to start. I wonder whether they'll have a replacement for that sort of use case.
Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media:
"Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness of meaning, and at the same time, conversely, the means of communication in the direction of hasty and all-flooding distribution have probably reached their maximum, for what is more hastily circulated than gossip?"
I'm guessing this was about newspapers/journalists which probably isn't the message people around here would like.
"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." - Soren Kierkegaard
Given the extreme anti-tech sentiment and inaccurate reporting pervasive in among journalists. I think many here would totally agree with this statement.
The hypocritical media and leftists: Social media is evil because it spies on you and it manipulates you.
The same hypocritical media and leftists: Social media is evil because it doesn't spy on you and manipulate you the way we want it to.
The hypocritical media and leftists: Net neutrality is a human right. Everyone should have equal access and opportunities on the internet.
The same hypocritical media and leftists: People I disagree with don't have a right to the internet or social media. ISPs and social media companies are private companies and can do whatever they want.
The hypocritical media and leftists: Hate speech isn't free speech.
The same hypocritical media and leftists: Spews most of the hate speech on social media.
Having studied philosophy, I can say with some confidence that your comment is the straw man, not mine. My comment may have flaws, but the straw man fallacy isn't one.
Also, it's been my experience that a particular segment of the population loves to use "straw man", "whataboutism", "russian bot", etc attacks.
Pointing out hypocrisy, making an observation or caricaturing one side isn't a straw man.
Showdead shows dead comments, which has nothing to do with downvoting. But if you find a downvoted comment hard to read because it's faded, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page, where it should be black again.
Could you please stop posting generic political flamebait? It doesn't belong on the site because it makes things dumber and more aggressive and we really just want to learn something instead.
They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total.
YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted, but I feel it's still an improvement.
I'm still not entirely convinced this vote based filtering is really more effective than the basic old chronological threading it 'improved' upon. It opens itself up to extreme gaming and the threaded nature often results in what are, more or less, the exact same conversation chains happening multiple times in different places in a topic. Threaded + votes also results in a very artificial selection of top posts. Posts that are more viewed, and aren't awful, are more likely to get more votes further reinforcing their prioritization.
And maybe the most important thing of all. The vast majority of people do not check out new threads. So you get a very artificial selection of topics that end up making it onto the front page, since it's selected by the tiny minority that do view and vote upon the new topics.
I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.
I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.
Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.
Make it multiple choice not free text. Limit to a few basic reasons. Make that thing pop up for every downvote and watch downvotes reduce over time. Also, maybe assign weights to how often one downvotes. So say you are someone who disagrees often, your downvotes become less and less potent the longer you are in session.
Honestly my post was mostly a joke, but I don't think mandating a rationale is a good idea, and I give a rationale for ~85% of my downvotes. Probably a third of those don't deserve rationale--I'm responding to someone who is pretty overtly trolling or otherwise trying to incent a flamewar. Beyond that, I will occassionally not leave an explanation because
1. I don't have time to type out an appropriately nuanced comment, and an un-nuanced comment is hardly better qualified than a driveby downvote.
2. No matter the quality of my explanatory comment, it will only be a target for partisan downvoters. I don't care much for my karma, but I do care for my time and I don't want to waste it so trolls can give my view an air of illegitimacy.
Besides, while it is annoying to be downvoted anonymously, no one owes me an explanation. It's a courtesy at best, and any attempt to regulate it will be defeated by insincere feedback.
Maybe, but this seems far more likely to only amplify the majority voice. Especially on a platform like Twitter, this would inevitably be used to suppress a dissenting minority more than it is used to encourage thoughtful explanations. Not trying to shoot down suggestions; moderation is hard.
Slashdot had, 20 years ago, different types of upvote and downvote, so you could say things were "insightful" or "off topic". You could even alter the weightings attached to them so "Funny" would be negative rather than positive.
Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...
I don't understand why facebook isn't better at determining the intent of the message: hide messages with "following" "f" or whatever and just subscribe the user to notifications—which they could have done otherwise if the option was made more obvious.
Maybe I don't use FB enough but I hadn't heard of this "f" thing (beyond 'F' being a Call of Duty meme). I imagine it's an unexpected usecase for Facebook and one that would better be served by making a prominent "subscribe to notification" feature, rather than coming up with a machine learning solution. What if the parent comment is a quiz type question for which there are answers A through F? Admittedly it's an edge case but it's an example of how diverse the strange ways people use FB for commenting and discussing.
Careful - the rules say you're not allowed to complain about downvoting. I've made this suggestion myself on a number of occasions in the past, probably different accounts. The quickest approach to problem fixing - the hn approach - have a rule saying don't complain about the problem.
I think this stems from downvotes being abused. If a comment is well written and constructive, you should not downvote it just because you disagree with it. The real intent of downvotes is to flush away off topic and low effort comments.
> There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.
It happens when you've struck a nerve but nobody wants to try and refute you because engaging in debate comes with a risk of you actually being right and them actually being wrong and some part of their ideology hinges on the correctness of whatever you're challenging.
For HN, I think up-votes and down-votes counts should be shown individually. The comments with no up-votes and lots of downvotes would go grey - universally considered bad. The comments with lots of up-votes and down-votes, but with net down, indicates controversial opinion but with some support/validity.
So if you want to interact, you have to formulate a thought in an elegant message? Most wont pass the barrier of having to think hard about something. (ie. thinking fast and slow / switching from system 1 to system 2 is _hard_)
277 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThat said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception ;-)
Thinking back it coincides somewhere around the same time HN improved their mobile viewing experience. Unsure if it's related but does feel HN reached some wider audience, or at least has a broader acceptance of varying levels of quality for comments.
Then most people need better education (and not just vocational training).
The amount of things discussed in philosophy and science journals which people aren't aware of is mind-boggling, to the point where every argument online takes place not taking into account any research and resorting to pure speculation and fans of each speculative hypothesis (stated as fact of course) up/downvoting. This happens on Reddit and HN despite it being more visible on Twitter and such. But even I don't have the time to look up the research on any given topic I want to care about.
For some things, absolutely (after all 99% on the internet is crap). But if one can never do it, but can, e.g. spend 3 hours checking celebrity gossip, then there's a problem!
Reading things thoroughly takes time, and time is money. Scientists are paid to read the current literature on their field. Government and corporate analysts are paid to collect data and provide synthetic memos to executives. Journalists are paid to read sources as a background to their story. If you want me to read your wall of text, you either have to convince me that you are worth reading (through your reputation) or pay me to do it.
HN is indeed an exception in that I find the site to be a kind of guarantee that most of users are well-versed in tech topics and thus have something interesting to say. In that sense the whole website provides a reputation to its users. Twitter has no such guarantee.
Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing.
The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.
We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.
Also, even mathematical proofs are cumbersome to state in a purely formal way. Moreover, many of our arguments hinge more on things like accuracy of assumptions, informal inferences, disagreement on "axioms" and goals, etc, not on formal validity of arguments.
1. post something where you can understand what they mean but they didn't spend the time (not that you should have to) to refine the point and people are pedantic
2. post something so absurd that has no basis in reality.
I agree that the end result is screaming at each other but nobody is on Twitter to engage in debates in the first place. Nobody can present a valid discussion that was hampered in any serious way by twitter's character limit.
And I have seen many insightful discussions on Twitter. Not everything has to page long retorts.
I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing. That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong. What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting, which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
For example, I'll reformat above text to fit into 280 character buckets, which actually won't even be a good aproximation of what I would have written on Twitter, since I refelected on the text, restructuring it and editing it through out. Here it goes:
> In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication.
> Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.
> I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing.
> That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong.
> What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting...
> ... which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
By reading that, you can tell that the rhythm of the text doesn't match the rhythm of the divisions. The text is too wordy for the constraints, sentences too long. Last sentence had to be cut into two paragraphs. It's almost giving you indigestion, a feeling like you're taking too large bites too fast.
I wonder when they're going to start testing this and what the results are. I hope they share what they learn, this could be an interesting experiment given how core a part of Twitter the like/favorite button has always been!
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on-twi...
It'd be nice if Twitter could reconcile it's shitty RSS replacement and crazy-drunken-uncle-shouting-into-the-void halves into something coherent.
It's found to the right of the heart button.
P.s: I’m the founder of Kozmos, but honestly would promote any bookmarking service over Twitter features.
But as well as when they started merging liked posts into the content feed on the main apps, it did remove the critical thing if it being an option for feedback to a post, without sharing the content to your own timeline (a retweet).
I don't understand any logic behind this change at all, and if there is, there's a paywall. But twitter is for everything, not just politics. If you're using politics to drive your platform, it's a shitshow for anyone else that uses the platform for more recreational purposes
Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.
Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of appreciation. I do that a lot.
I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone who actually tweets though.
If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion. Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.
If you share to an empty audience, it will still be added to the share count.
Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.
And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.
They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.
Done well and taken in context, it's funny?
Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example.
Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects.
Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.
1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging
2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse
3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote
3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all.
There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.
Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.
I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them...
That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
"people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion".
I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.
Yeah, I think I've seen a few of those. Nothing says constructive discussion like death threats.
> 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
The problem of online harassment is not (mainly) that the service UI becomes cumbersome to use for the victim. It's that everyone else can observe they are harassed and the victim loses control over their online presence. Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed.
There's a perspective where this is a good thing, but I think I know where you're coming from. I've seen people on the receiving end of these attacks who say they still want to know about it so they know about any tangible threats.
I think the "shitstorm" dynamics are more complex and there are different motivations for people to take part in one. E.g., it could be simple venting, virtue singalling to peers in your brigade or you sharing the tweet to others in your circle - nothing that needs any perticipation by the original author.
In extreme cases, an author might not realize what is going on until they find outraged articles about themselves in the news.
See the comparable problem of cyberbullying for an example. There, it's often completely irrelevant whether or not a victim knows about the messages that are written about them. Indeed, they can be bullied on online platforms where they don't even have an account. All that is required is for participants in the bullying to know how to access the messages.
Of course, harrassing PMs are a different issue. Here, you can be sure the messages are exclusively directed towards the author and the harm is being done by having the author read them. Blocking those kind of messages would stop the bullying action itself and could work. But then again, this is not so much different from the oldfashioned blocking we already have.
But this is probably me trying to salvage twitter for the non-toxic purposes and its probably a losing battle. The fact that what you propose is necessary is a terrible state of affairs.
I just wish someone else would come along and eat their lunch already.
A few Tweets are quoted to give the impression of widespread outrage.
Tweet embedding is a negative value feature that’s helping to corrode regular journalism, and that seems to be of very limited value.
Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest.
Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :)
Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously.
How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it.
Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)
(in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)
Or you can do it en masse in the browser: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitte...
I prefer individual control over central control. Maybe they should make the "Turn off Rewteets" feature more visible.
"You're holding it wrong."
I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.
It might be the hint that maybe sometimes people are at least somewhat responsible for their problems.
If you don't want the "like" button on Twitter, you're not allowed to press the "downvote" button on HN.
Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.
It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
curious lack of detail. sounds like an euphemism for "accused them of sexual harassment" or "accused them of supporting a sexual harasser".
Then unfollow the guy. Seriously, it's that simple. You have the power to curate your own experience, that's my point.
> It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative.
Unfollow
I can't tell you how to cure your favorite subcultures of their bullshit, I'm telling you how to have a pleasant experience on Twitter. If that means your Twitter timeline becomes emptied, you'll have to find new people to follow.
> We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
No, that's actually just what your slice of "society" is like. Mine isn't like that, because I curate it not to be like that.
Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.
I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.
I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.
I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.
What if HN didn’t show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on invisible votes? I wonder if a system that’s more simple like that would carry over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?
Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts per day.
The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.
Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.
Twitter is full of hatred. People who disagree with you will threaten you and try to publicly shame you. Someone takes something out of context, then shares it with hundreds/thousands of other like-minded people and attempts to get them all to target you.
Facebook is full of ignorance. Doesn't matter what you say, some ill informed person will speak over you and refute your points. FB is absolutely the worst for this. The public posts about controversial issues is loaded with ignorant people spouting nonsense over others.
Reddit is full of downvote and report abusers. If someone disagrees with you, they and their friends will downvote your comment until it collapses due to the negative vote threshold. The more extremist ones will report every single thing you say and attempt to get you banned.
These sites also have no recourse for abuse. Once you are banned, it is next to impossible to get it overturned.
Media Preview: Off
Reduced Motion: On
Video Autoplay: Never
Increased Contrast: On
I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.
Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.
It's like a curation engine where you can manually select curation sources.
On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and follow your friends. They shouldn't screw it just to cater to a certain part of their user base.
Please remove retweet count as well.
Maybe Twitter can become a social network without herd mentality.
And then facebook(incl. instagram) can also remove their 'reaction emojis'
No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags, emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.)
People always underestimate the extent to which UI design and content structure drive communication tone. Sure, just because some website is messy doesn't mean it will immediate make everyone a jerk, but this stuff has cumulative effect. As a way of example: try to write a long paper letter to someone by hand. You will immediately see how that changes the way you think.
Also, people should check out Jaron Lanier's talks on why everyone should delete their social media accounts. He doesn't talk about UI, but he makes some great points about economic incentives, behaviorism and emergent properties of ad-driven online economies.
I enjoy and have learned more from the discussions on HN than on any other platform. But what Twitter lacks in quality it more than makes up for in diversity and quantity. There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk to randos in Indiana and India all in the same thread. As crappy as the discussions can get, I have a hard time imagining how much better any such service could be without making tradeoffs on audience and ease of engagement. Mastodon, for example, seems to have limited scope and scale inextricable in its design. Which is not to say that that makes it a worser service -- just one that is inherently different from Twitter's model.
280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty.
> There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk
In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an anthill.
If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions online.
I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.
You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress.
The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.
On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over Tesla because he was on Twitter.
But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in their respective categories.
"USERS: we love twitter but it has problems
TWITTER: great we'll fix them
USERS: do you want to know what they are
TWITTER: absolutely not
USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product
TWITTER: likes are now florps
USERS: what
TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"
(The irony is that likes used to have a clear, simple use: bookmark something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.
Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)
The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enough.
Most of your users won't care. They'll enjoy the content. Someone chimes in that the sub or forum is no longer pure. The content is similar, but it's off-topic. The board is going to devolve into just pics of dogs (which is a legitimate concern). Other people defend that the board needs content, and that computer glasses and a scooter is similar enough to be inclusive. So where do you plant you flag? Will there be a zero-tolerance policy for anything that isn't a dog wearing sunglasses riding a skateboard (OMG mods are literally Nazis!!!), do you allow users to flag posts for review on a case-by-case basis (need more mods), or do you relax the content restriction (this board is trash since it lost its focus!)?
Twitter has no focused topic. The platform is for anyone to communicate whatever they want within reason. With disparate cultures than span every corner of the globe, how do you stop the problem from existing in the first place? Not everyone has the tolerance for scathing, brutal honesty. How do you draw the line between that and bullying? How do you differentiate between well-intended people who are misinformed and people spouting propaganda? I don't have the answer, but my time moderating forums about topics that have no impact on society has taught me that it's pretty much impossible to create a perfect platform that appeases everyone.
I actually have! I definitely don't think there's currently a good solution to this problem. But removing likes is ridiculous, too!
There's a furry eSports person (https://twitter.com/SonicFox5000) who likes a lot of gay furry porn on his main account. Many people were surprised when Twitter started doing this.
Really 90% of twitter for me is either liking great art or getting depressed by the news/US politics. Take away the art and twitter gets a lot less appealing.
I follow several thousand users so I guess the timeline algorithm doesn't bother showing me Liked activity. However, I do see "[some user] and 5 others liked this tweet" when I do a search for tweets, and I find that note to be more helpful than not, to be honest.
My curated collection of "likes" is one of my most valued possessions. 1000+ tweets that each made me laugh or smile or think in a powerful enough and unique enough way that I needed to save it. And I've spent a lot of time enjoying them after the fact. I wrote a slack command to show me a random one whenever I need to be picked up.
Granted, those 1000 tweets came buried in a lot of noise, but the diamonds on Twitter make it not only worthwhile but by far my favorite social network or online experience.
Of course, that's despite everything Twitter has done in the last several years and not because of it. Like a lot of Google products it's attracted that air of frequently making you believe they must not actually use it themselves.
Please don't do that. Repetition lowers the signal/noise ratio of conversation and the last thing we need here is people repeating the same things over and over.
If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.
I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system because of the said biased 'judges' - removing the like functionality doesn't seem like an improvement though.
Most people couldn’t make a coherent argument even if you gave them 100,000 words.
"Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness of meaning, and at the same time, conversely, the means of communication in the direction of hasty and all-flooding distribution have probably reached their maximum, for what is more hastily circulated than gossip?"
Interesting. Where did you get the quote from? I might add it my reading list :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Self-Examination
From this chapter:
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/zur-selbstprufung-der-gegen...
Couldn't immediately find an English version of the text.
"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." - Soren Kierkegaard
The same hypocritical media and leftists: Social media is evil because it doesn't spy on you and manipulate you the way we want it to.
The hypocritical media and leftists: Net neutrality is a human right. Everyone should have equal access and opportunities on the internet.
The same hypocritical media and leftists: People I disagree with don't have a right to the internet or social media. ISPs and social media companies are private companies and can do whatever they want.
The hypocritical media and leftists: Hate speech isn't free speech.
The same hypocritical media and leftists: Spews most of the hate speech on social media.
Also, it's been my experience that a particular segment of the population loves to use "straw man", "whataboutism", "russian bot", etc attacks.
Pointing out hypocrisy, making an observation or caricaturing one side isn't a straw man.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sigh, I would be losing a lot of my book marks.
YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted, but I feel it's still an improvement.
And maybe the most important thing of all. The vast majority of people do not check out new threads. So you get a very artificial selection of topics that end up making it onto the front page, since it's selected by the tiny minority that do view and vote upon the new topics.
I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.
Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.
1. I don't have time to type out an appropriately nuanced comment, and an un-nuanced comment is hardly better qualified than a driveby downvote.
2. No matter the quality of my explanatory comment, it will only be a target for partisan downvoters. I don't care much for my karma, but I do care for my time and I don't want to waste it so trolls can give my view an air of illegitimacy.
Besides, while it is annoying to be downvoted anonymously, no one owes me an explanation. It's a courtesy at best, and any attempt to regulate it will be defeated by insincere feedback.
Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...
It happens when you've struck a nerve but nobody wants to try and refute you because engaging in debate comes with a risk of you actually being right and them actually being wrong and some part of their ideology hinges on the correctness of whatever you're challenging.