This still happens today - actually I get a lot of dropped and reordered messages in a very well covered area. People don't realize it because a lot of the time we unconsciously design our text messages to be disposable.
The only reason I know is because I'm going through a big project and the big stakeholders are frequently communicating via text messages as well as phone and email. I've considered moving us to WhatsApp but we're nearing the end so its not that annoying, we just know to use it less.
SMS can be chained seamlessly to form longer messages. SMS is frequently between two parties, twitter is the opposite. I'd say SMS is very good for (asynch electronic) conversations between two people, twitter for one-way short thoughts that are fire-and-forget.
But then, can we really call it a conversation when potentially twitter user base is included in the event? It's more like lotsa people on a town square, shouting. Including the town idiots.
The newsworthy bit is that Jack seemed tripped up by it, too. Why agree to an interview in a format that will showcase the worst aspects of your product?
My theory is that Jack is trying to expose the flaws of twitter to the rest of the company. A way of bludgeoning the stubborn in the company by a blitz of bad press
His recent interviews and (lack of) leadership have shown that he bludgeons no one, and the stubborn person is him. He's just an unusual kind of stubborn: unwilling to make any decision at all.
That, too, is a form of visionary leadership. He is protecting a bubble of chaos in which creative ferment can occur, by refusing to let outside forces impose too much order on it. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on whether the bubble of chaos in question is working for you or not.
> by refusing to let outside forces impose too much order on it
He also refuses to let inside forces impose order on it. He doesn't do anything at all. I would call Twitter a camel -- a horse designed by committee -- but it seems it's not even that. He apparently just consults committees ad infinitum and then does nothing.
> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
> <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
most people don’t react to insults with physical injury
I'm not quite so sure about that. Most people don't hurl insults face-to-face. If people acted like their twitter personalities IRL, I would expect to see a massive uptick in fistfights.
From taking public transit, waiting in bus stops and walking through blue collar neighborhoods most insults are either ignored or get another insult in return.
Maybe we hang out in different circles, but I've never heard the level of insults IRL that I have read on Twitter. I have a feeling the large majority of those doing the insulting would be terrified to say those things to someones face because they know a physical altercation would end up being the common response.
Ok. Let’s put forth some baselines. In real life most people don’t grievously insult each other (discount passive aggressiveness, microagressions, bravado, boasting and other ultralight insults) Most people on Twitter don’t insult each other. A low percentage of people do in both cases. Does Twitter facilitate and provide a more lubricated vehicle for insult? Possibly?
> Most people on Twitter don’t insult each other. A low percentage of people do in both cases. Does Twitter facilitate and provide a more lubricated vehicle for insult? Possibly?
Possibly? Absolutely. The foundation of Twitter is the retweet. Without it, there is no sharing, and stuff can't 'go viral'. Most people don't insult each other, but they sure do like and retweet insults, false facts and other negative stuff ruining online communities.
Retweeting is the ultimate cop-out, because you didn't have the guts to say those things, but had no issue having it show up on your feed and those of your followers. You were just "sharing".
I think I get what you're saying. I've seen people call others "fat fucks" (heard that one yesterday) and shit like that in person in public, which is fairly extreme by face-to-face standards but very tame by twitter standards. I've never seen somebody accuse somebody else face-to-face of being a cannibalistic child rapist, but I've seen that on twitter! I think that's the kind of insult that would stand a decent chance of starting a physical altercation.
HN User mc32 is being overly general in characterizing working class people. Lower working class people aren't out insulting each other and using expletives any more than "white collar" people. I live in both worlds, and that's just a stereotype with no basis in reality. In fact, I'd say that the average tech type speaks in a far more base fashion than most of the garbage men I know. (Certainly more base than any of the waitresses or cashiers I know.)
IRL, gobs of people are out insulting each other neither in the lower classes, nor in the upper classes. Yes, it happens MUCH more on a place like Twitter, but not at all IRL.
I’ve seen higher incidence of insults at working class bus stops, bus lines and workplaces. Sometimes it’s vagrants, sometimes it’s just people about their business who get fed up with something. On Caltrain I see fewer incidents than on the VTA or MUNI. I’ve taken them all. I’ve worked in working class neighborhoods and worked with them too. They tease each other a lot, sometimes they go over the line and then some get worked up, etc. They might throw epithets as a means of retaliation against perceived slights (as minor as asking to get by (passage)).
Now, I do hear indirect insults in white collar circles where they insult other people not present (for example berating working classes for the choices in life they make) but we’re not talking about indirect insults. We’re talking the ones where there is the potential for direct retaliation.
I think you're wrong. I think most people do hurl insults face-to-face. They just don't do it often. Most people, especially of the working class, can very easily get into these kinds of spats in the real world.
From what I've seen, at least in the sports arena, most of the physical fights start off with verbal insults. That could also be because sports already has an element of Us vs Them built into it. However, the speed with which things escalate from verbal insults is quite amazing.
That's like foreplay in those situations, the verbal abuse is as much about working the offender up - and sizing up their opposition - as it is about actually abusing anyone.
Contempt of court (attempt to unduly influence court proceedings); perhaps unduly strict in the UK but in no way Twitter or Internet-specific. And getting arrested was I suspect part of the protest.
Sorry for the Daily Mail link but it looks like the mainstream press hasn't catch up on the subject. Afaik transphobia is not on the same level with "bomb threats or holocaust denial" but apparently people get arrested for it.
Daily Mail reporting will be grossly inaccurate on this subject. I suspect this was not for a single incident but as part of a campaign of harrasment. There's a lot of that going on against trans people at the moment, often enabled by twitter and the gutter press.
Boris Johnson has practically said the same thing in his latest editorial in The Telegraph [1], i.e. that that woman was transphobic and that the U.K. police should focus on other more stringent tasks (like knife crime). Transphobia is ugly but it’s not on the same level as Holocaust denial and people shouldn’t get arrested for it.
Boris Johnson is one of the men who lied about Europe so often the EU made the Euromyths page in an attempt to stem the tide. He's not a reliable source (in any case that's an opinion piece), and nor is the Telegraph.
There's a culture war going on, trans people are the current wedge issue, and people like Boris are absolutely part of it.
Again, we need the underlying facts, which I suspect include a longer history of targeted harassment rather than a driveby twitter insult.
Johnson himself said the woman was a transphobic, him lying should mean that the woman was in the right and not a transphobic at all. I know about his past records, I only mentioned him to show that the story was real and mainstream, not some journalistic hack (like some of the stuff published in the Daily Mail).
Yes. The arrest was for harassment and doxxing, not for misgendering.
paganel, when you say "Sorry for the Daily Mail link" it sounds like you know you're citing a source that will be extremely untrustworthy on this topic, and then did it anyway.
The Daily Mail is in the top three newspapers, by circulation, in the UK. And far far more read than the broadsheets. How is it not considered the "mainstream"?
"Section 127 [of the Communications Act 2003] has been used to prosecute a young man who tweeted his frustration about being unable to see his girlfriend due to airport closure. His tweets, which were made without intent to carry out their content or incite others to do so, resulted in his conviction for being a menace under the Act – thankfully that conviction has now been overturned;" https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/free-spee...
"according to Miller on Wednesday this week, he found himself answering questions — for 34 minutes – from an officer from Humberside Police... On that account, Miller says things such as ‘trans women are not women’" https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/01/is-it-now-a-crime-to-l...
1) I can't see a description of what he said, but if it's the case I remember he said something about blowing the airport up and someone reported it to police as a threat.
Twitter is a broadcasting service, and you're responsible for how it is read. You don't get a pass because you totally didn't mean it that way. I can't get upset about this one.
2) & 3) Doesn't sound like arrest/prosecution? I don't doubt a lot of things got reported to police, and they followed up by talking to the person.
The OP mentioned arrest. You then wanted example of prosecution. I cited 3,300 cases of being detained and questioned, but that clearly didn't satisfy.
There does not need to be 100s of successful prosecutions a year for there not to be consequences of police action (whether it be warnings, being detained, arrests, prosecutions, jail) and for there to be serious chilling effects.
EDIT:
> You don't get a pass because you totally didn't mean it that way
I'm no lawyer, but isn't intent a critical part of analysing someone's actions in prosecution (and perhaps why Liberty mentioned it)?
First off, if people are being arrested and not charged, that's a violation of their rights, and a huge hassle. If your law is written so that people are being unnecessarily arrested, that's a bad law.
Proving intention used to be the case, but I think a lot of speech laws being made aren't taking this into account, and this is incredibly dangerous. You used the words "gypped" or "scot-free"? Well, those terms are an implied racial (cultural really) slur.
"Hocus pocus" originally comes from Protestant mockery of the Latin words of Consecration from the Catholic Mass. Catholics could, in theory, be offended by that. (I'm Catholic, but I just see it as an interesting piece of historical linguistic trivia, although I know it wasn't always so).
You used the words or "niggardly" or "snigger"? Neither of which have any negative racial or cultural connotations. The first is of Scandanavian etymology, and the second is of Dutch etymology, but they sound a lot like a word that is insulting. If someone takes offense at your racial insult, when you were using a perfectly innocent word, can you use that as a defense? Will it matter when social media has already tried and executed you, and are marching for your punishment?
People are being arrested for using the wrong pronouns. There's no way it can matter whether that was intentional or not. Hate speech laws are defined based not on what someone does, but on how someone else reacts to it, and it's impossible to list all the ways it could be applied. For all we know, people can get into trouble for something that started out as a 4chan prank.
There's no way to prove it one way or another. Proving intention to murder or conspire can be made using physical evidence, but how can you prove you were doing it with or without malice aforethought?
Were you warned and then persisted in your behavior? OK, maybe that would count, but it could still be a slip of the tongue or a typo. This is about as Orwellian as it gets.
That's why hate speech laws, even the best intentioned, scare the crap out of me, not because I support hate-speech, or use it, but because I know that it's way to easy to turn them into a witchhunt, and to prosecute people for completely benign behavior.
And yet, Jay-Z, or whoever made the song quoted, was able to release this lyric in the public without causing a problem. (I'm not saying this is right or wrong, because I don't know what the lyric is, but the double standard should trouble everyone.)
Implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be offended" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of tyranny, which a lot of people seem to think is perfectly fine. Language changes, slang changes even faster, people like 4chan like to stir up trouble by showing how easy it is to manipulate the public perception. There's literally no way to define "hate speech" in an objective way without having to constantly modify the definition. And just as it is possible to be inadvertently guilty of "hate speech" because of ignorance (e.g., I didn't know the word "gyp" was a slur against Romani.) it's even more possible to engage in hate speech without using any of the explicitly proscribed language.
As an example, for this conversation, I'm going to define "grot" to be a racial slur against someone I am hypothetically prejudiced against. Does me calling someone a "grot" count as hate speech, when no one knows what it means? What if the word catches on among my friends (who are also hypothetical bigots) enough so that a common acquaintance knows what we mean when we use it. Does that count? How many people need to recognize this meaning of "grot" before it becomes something you can't say on TV? How many people need to recognize this meaning before you can be arrested in the U.K.? What if I can incite a crowd to violence by chanting "Grot!" over and over? Yeah, we'd all probably agree that's problematic speech, but where's the dividing line?
If you ask me, people who make "hate speech" laws are a bunch of grots because it's impossible to enforce them objectively and consistently.
> And yet, Jay-Z, or whoever made the song quoted, was able to release this lyric in the public without causing a problem.
Context matters. Saying otherwise is either uninformed or dishonest. Performing a song containing "the roof is on fire" is different than just yelling the phrase. And yes, how others perceive your behavior is partially your responsibility. Just like people might kill you in self-defense if they perceive you as threat, even in case your gun was just a theater prop.
Regarding your "where is the line"... communication always requires interpretation and there will never be an "objective and consistent" line. I'm sure i could easily rewrite your example to fit a law of every country in existence. As for the US, I could go for "Defamation Per Se", in other words were implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be talked bad about" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of blah blah blah
So yes, we will always argue about were line are drawn, just like others will try to overstep them without consequences. That's part of life.
I saw this TED talk by Jon Ronson from 2015 titled "When online shaming goes too far", largely a teaser for his book on the topic, but nevertheless rather sobering. Basically how we're all one tweet away from disaster.
NOTE: NSFW due to using quotes of "normal" discourse on Twitter.
Which is strange because I see more targeted rage here on a VC forum.
The Twitter page I've cultivated has low/no rage and even interesting conversations. Sure, if I venture to gender, race, or politics, Ill be greeted by the rage machine. So volitionally choose to stay out of it.
Cultivate who you follow to a narrow tech field, and be very careful that whom you choose doesn't invest in hate and rage mechanics.
Facebook, for me, is the rage machine every few posts interspersed with cat/dog pics.
Ahh, but you have discovered the crux of the problem Twitter faces. I have done as you did, culling my Twitter to only include interesting people in my industry who I can learn from. What happened?
My Twitter use dropped off a cliff. The people I follow write interesting articles or give good talks, but are incredibly boring on Twitter, or retweet stuff that once more puts me face to face with the 'regular Twitter' dumpster fire.
"Microblogging" works for traffic or service updates, and commercials. Its use case narrows to almost nothing when it comes to human interactions, which require more substance than what a <textarea maxlength='280'> provides.
On Twitter any form of context is lost pretty quick. But it's a formidable machine for viral marketing, no matter who is the target and what is the message. It's the most efficient social media but also the most toxic. It also became the main source of news for online media, who spend their time making up stories based on Tweets.
The Covington Catholic School incident is a perfect example of made up news originating from Twitter.
Twitter was not made to have conversations. It is not a forum system. And that is not a bad thing. If you want to use a forum, why don't you sign up for one?
I feel like Kara Swisher just handled this in a bad way. You can easily have a conversation on Twitter: you make a tweet, someone else answers it. Rinse-repeat. Jack would've just needed to load Kara's twitter profile and reply to new tweets. What am I missing?
>I feel like Kara Swisher just handled this in a bad way.
Isn't it on Twitter, you know the ones running and presumably most familiar with the platform, to request how the interview be done rather than for the interviewer to know the nuances themselves?
Regardless of what Twitter is or isn't, how in the world is the CEO surprised by how his product works? And we're not talking some obscure corner case, but basic use case?
Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team?
Such a basic level of unfamiliarity with their own product gives me a lot of pause that he can do anything to guide the company on fixing rampant automated accounts or making it less of a frequently hostile forum.
To be fair, this is a really atypical mode of using Twitter. Normally it's used for shouting at your audience/someone you disagree with. It's rarely used for true conversations, so I can somewhat see why the CEO is unfamiliar with its performance in that role.
Not a twitter user myself, but I've seen a lot of people use their twitter handles like they'd use an E-Mail address. They say "this is a twitter handle send me a DM if you want to talk with me" instead of "this is my E-Mail address please send me an E-Mail if you want to talk". So they do derive conversational value from twitter.
DMs are chats. It's a totally different medium than tweets. Separate UI and everything. I can understand how you would not know this, since you don't use the product (neither do I, any more), so this is just an FYI.
It’s worth noting that DMs have a much more generous length limit than tweets. You can actually type an entire paragraph into a single DM versus the formerly 140, now 280 characters a public tweet is limited to.
But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? You'd think that after a decade he would have some idea of what Twitter is good and bad at. I can imagine having this kind of failed interview when the company was 3 years old, but after more than a decade, it's a bit bizarre.
Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.
If so, it was evidently with a lot of unsupported overconfidence. Clearly turned into a major demonstration of how it can not be used for a good conversation.
I've found pretty much the same thing, just good for trading headlines & brief insights. Though, its constraints do cause me to improve the focus of some ideas to express them briefly and clearly, so that's a good exercise.
> But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter?
Many people are knowingly doing a kabuki theatre version of a conversation where they are specifically trying to get attention and grab more followers and retweets. You can see it in how responses are framed. There's a lot of attempted "mic drop" moments.
Real people don't have conversations like that, because they're not playing to an audience. In real conversations, people also don't just walk away from each other at the first jab, but that happens on Twitter constantly.
It's similar to how 95% of Reddit's content is posted by 1% of its user base. Most Twitter users aren't tweeting, they're voyeurs to online meltdowns (real or orchestrated), celebrity gossip and slapfights between political commentators/media/trolls.
I have never understood how MySpace became unfashionable because it was "too gaudy/immature" while Twitter has been a wildfire of horrible UX, hate speech, bullying and user surveillance for over a decade now.
Well I think you answered your own question. Twitter is successful despite it's dumpster-fire UX because the conversation quality on twitter is also a dumpster-fire and people love to watch that kind of shit. It's like NASCAR fans rooting for crashes.
I think the MySpace narrative has always been a bit off- sure, most user pages were very much in the vein of Geocities, but that was only one problem. Very few of my friends were on MySpace, and the main reason they cited was it was too complicated. Even copy-pasting a pre-made layout was too much bother. I clearly remember multiple friends pushing me to get a FB account very hard, and often the main selling point was "easy".
Although for Twitter, I think they absolutely know the site has a problem with toxicity, but they 100% do not care. Angry people will spend longer on the site arguing, post more, and see more ads. They may say they care, but their actual business incentives push them towards maintaining the current state of discourse.
Jack's been out and about lately... whatever the thinking is about Twitter and its ability to respond to the criticisms at play, I think it's worth noting that Jack is trying.
Just in the last couple of weeks, he's been making himself available for long form discussions. He was on Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and other podcasts. He participated in this Kara interview.
He's been a bit more behind the scenes before, and now he's more visible and active and participatory. He doesn't have all the answers yet, but maybe this effort will lead to improvements.
The one use case I’ve seen of Twitter is rapid fire updates about some developing situation, like an emergency. But it can’t be a back and forth discussion. It can be one person or many people adding to a combined discussion via that hashtag.
However, even when I see people do what is effectively a long form blog post on Twitter, I often give up on it before the end because it’s too frustrating.
>Twitter is rapid fire updates about some developing situation.
This is the only thing i've ever used Twitter for. It's the best place to find out about problems on my local transit system. Long before the company ever gives an alert, there'll dozens of people tweeting angrily about the problems.
Yep, anytime I see some larger than normal police/fire presence in my city, or a large cloud of smoke, I go on Twitter. It works great for breaking events and is usually always way ahead of any news organizations (which are usually just pulling things from Twitter, too).
Huh? Then why does Twitter allow you to @reply someone? It is a feature. I mean, Jack Dorsey even doing this interview shows it's a feature, otherwise he should have said "Twitter was not made for this."
And not all blog posts are one-way communication, just like you said, that is why we have comment systems attached to blog posts.
Right, I think it was, but if they let users just do it on their own Twitter could wipe their hands of it (e.g. "you're not using it correctly.") But because they made it an official feature, they have embraced that functionality. So it's a moot point now.
I understand why they did it. They let the site kind of grow organically to see what it could become and embraced how people were using it. And I think they are likely super nervous from a financial perspective about any user loss if they start pulling features.
But I think Twitter has a similar problem as Facebook -- it connects a lot of random people into a conversation system that should likely not be connected. On HN, I'm connecting with people that care about the tech community. On a Reddit sub-reddit, it's specific to some topic. Twitter just seems to encourage too many outliers to get involved in conversations they should probably sit back and simply listen on.
Maybe that was the original billing, but Twitter has enabled conversation for a very, very long time with @replies, quoting and so on. Silly to pretend otherwise.
Twitter is a million soap boxes in the town square.
Perhaps what we really need is a million meeting rooms that people can enter or leave as they desire.
I don't use Twitter, but I do use Facebook to keep up with family and friends, but the primary value I get out of it is from the groups I belong to, often private, where people can have (moderated, if needed) discussions about topics of common interest.
It's not like the example in the article would be hard to reproduce. It's not like those insanely tricky bugs that only present themselves in rare circumstances.
They would easily test for this and fix it. They do not care.
Actually I am pretty shocked at the amount of “incompetence” in the business world especially at high levels.
It seems people shmooze and make big deals happen. But they have no idea how their own product works, often.
There are notable exceptions: Elon Musk. Warren Buffett. Jobs and Gates and Bezos. That’s why their companies rock.
But like, Apple after Jobs, not so much. I am not convinced the higher-ups really are in touch with what’s the main user facing issue. Like how Apple repeatedly allowed the entire Mac app store certificates to just expire leaving all apps broken [1], or how they released an iOS where no one could click a link in safari!! [2]
But that’s actually still a very high level of competence of tons of people in the company. Just the executives and lack of processes to catch this surprise me.
Google doesn’t have such problems. It only has problems of product roadmap, shuttering Google Reader and Google Plus after making the entire userbase embrace it, or replacing Talk with three different products like Hangouts, Allo, Meet, etc.
But most of all I just realized how much successful B-level people are just... well, they make so many spelling mistakes in email, often paint by numbers and don’t really think out of the box on the most basic things the way someone would if they were constantly learning about their space and their problem. Like oh A and B don’t go together? I guess it won’t work out. Oh, just one tiny thing had to be tweaked in B and suddenly we have a huge revenue stream coming? Huh, would you look at that. And here I was about to focus on something else.
Has anyone else noticed this? I am not sure if it was always the case or think it’s a general sense of ADD that came over the business world. Hardly anyone reads books. Emails have to be 5-7 lines long. Spelling and grammar mistakes make you seem important. People - especially busy businesspeople - dont have time to read 2 lines of instructions when onboarding - they zip past them and then scratch their head what to do on next screen. I have seen it.
It seems like lots of consumer products relying on advertising as a revenue model fall prey to the same problem.
They aggressively optimize for a panoply of metrics that make them appealing to advertisers. Often this means hacking the algorithms governing the interactions between users (viewership, timeline visibility, feed) until the outcome yields satisfying metrics, meaningful or not.
At this point a complex web of chaotic feedback loops has formed and it becomes hard to change anything. The system's stateful complexity far exceeds the engineering/product team's understanding of it. It's like trying to debug a neural network.
My impression after following him on there for a while: he still uses, and sees the platform as if it's the original version of Twitter from ~2006. Most of his tweets are written in a way that sound like a person writing in a public diary, not someone expecting to have a conversation.
He's using Twitter for what it's good at, desperately hoping people somehow stop ruining the experience while still maintaining popularity and ad views.
> Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team?
Of course not. It's boilerplate CEO speak. It's a way of "answering" the question without making any commitments and seems to terminate any further discussion.
Joe Rogan and Sam Harris discuss this on Joe Rogans podcast #1241
Twitter is like a town hall where everyone can heckle. Here’s a tree visualization I made of a portion of the #KaraJack thread, which demonstrates the problem (and only includes a fraction of the non-Jack/Kara tweets): https://treeverse.app/view/pX89745H
Eh, maybe for people who've been using it for years. When celebrities do AMAs without guidance by experienced users, they constantly reply to the wrong threads or even the thread itself. Formatting being hard (e.g. you have to press enter two times to do a single line break) also doesn't help.
Markdown is the worst kind of formatting except for all the others.
I literally don't know how to write a sentence with more than one asterisk in on HN, and I've been here several years. Formatting is hard but Reddit at least follows a known standard and has a "formatting help" link right under the comment box if you need it.
I don't tend to agree with this, the biggest issue with Markdown is pretty much the double newline, and it only makes sense in places like email where you want single newlines ignored. On Reddit/HN where nobody writes comments with hard newlines unless they mean to change paragraphs, that feature could have been omitted.
And yet something as basic as a preview is missing. Reddit's community-driven browser plugin ([0]) at least adds that, HN's counterpart [1] sorely needs it.
---
Come to think of it, is there a definitive guide to HN comment formatting? Implementing a preview feature in [1] would be doable if the markup is documented.
You're downvoted, but I tend to agree. Regardless of the community, reddit's full-width, compact layout is the easiest way I've found to follow a tree-based conversation.
The one thing that reddit and Hacker News lack is the ability to easily see new posts on an existing thread (though you can get this with a reddit gold subscription or becoming a moderator). The other thing they lack is an index of comments (like you would see with a mail reader).
Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.
> I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by?
By index, I mean a threaded list of messages that one can scroll through without having the message body present. In an email/news client, you would typically see something like:
Subject Some Author Date
Re: Subject Another Author Date
Re: Subject A third Author Date
Re: Subject A fourth Author Date
Re: Subject A fifth Author Date
Re: Subject Some Author Date
in one window pane. Then you could click on one of the the messages and the body would be displayed in another window pane. Scrolling through that index is much faster than having to scroll through a lot of comments on reddit or Hacker News. And finding a new message was simply looking for ones that were in bold font.
I prefer 4chan's system with automatic reply linking. The issue with Reddit and HN is they model conversation as a tree, but real written conversation between several people is usually a DAG with one person replying to several posts at once. The UI can definitely be improved, but trees ain't it.
Hacker news does some parts of that better, like promoting new comments higher. On reddit, a new comment is unlikely to be visible enough to get traction.
I've always considered Twitter an excellent platform for shouting into the void, but I can't imagine anyone would even consider having a conversation there.
Twitter was founded as a micro-blogging service, not a forum. It evolved into the anonymous comment section for the entire internet somewhere along the way.
Seems like neither side were being self aware in this case.
I'm also not sure exactly what the product problem is with Twitter. The only exposure I have to a group of people upset about Twitter are the folks that Joe Rogan had on his podcast, and their complaints are just that it's toxic.
However Twitter unlike Google and Facebook is the least functional as a utility, so refraining from using it if you don't like it seems like a no brainer. You're not losing anything functional
The whole reason Jack and Ev feuded was over what they thought Twitter should be. Jack thought it was a better version of status messages on AIM. Ev wanted it to be a blog platform like blogger.
The criticism is something like Twitter enables the worst in humans, it's a platform that can unjustly destroy one's character and career. From a product perspective, its working. Yet it is still a net negative, at least that's the claim.
When someone is being doxxed, and mobs are forming, it's usually happening on that platform.
Don’t you think the inherent design — “microblogging” — encourages a toxic environment? Most people aren’t poets or great writers, so I just frequently see people talking past each other or misreading what has been said because there is zero nuance.
I'm not sure the design is responsible for much of that. I see plenty of people on Reddit and this very site who talk past each other and skip straight over the nuance when it is presented. I also see favoritism shown to the "sound bite"-style comments over the thought out ones, particularly on contentious issues.
I agree it's present in any kind of dialogue where people assume the worst of others, but Reddit at least allows unlimited text. Same with this site -- I've seen many reactive comments, but then a thread resolves it and everyone reaches a good place. I've seen similar on Reddit, although less so compared to here.
I don't think I've ever seen the same on Twitter, ever. It usually devolves into something worse.
I do think there are parallels between Reddit and Twitter that encourage a level of snark that is just never appropriate when talking to a human in real life, unless you know them well.
Great read, this perfectly expresses how I see it. I really like the "medium is the message" idea, haven't heard that before, but it definitely makes sense.
It's why the "happy birthday" messages in Facebook have always felt so hollow (especially because facebook is really nudging you to do it), but those same words sent via text message to the person are received differently (or even via Messenger within Facebook).
>It evolved into the anonymous comment section for the entire internet somewhere along the way.
I don't think this is the case. It became influential in certain circles, but there are many people who don't use Twitter. It became a circlejerk too quickly.
That’s not entirely true. Twitter launched at SXSW, and people who were there can tell you that it was primarily used to build on the fly chat rooms during each session.
Speakers would define the hash tag at the start, and then many would project the post stream up front and respond to questions or comments from the feed on stage. The audience would also discuss what was being said amongst themselves.
It’s really just too big and too public for that to work anymore. It almost needs a feature where posting to a certain hashtag requires a password or being a certain user, then the 2 of them could’ve posted to that hashtag exclusively and been the only thing in the feed, and easily followed.
Obvious problem there is that hashtags don’t really scale like that, but it gives you some sense for strategies they might take to tackle the issue.
So, basically it's exactly like IRC! Only instead of your client sending PRIVMSG #channel-name :YOUR MESSAGE HERE, you have to type the channel name yourself every time... and there's only one server that doesn't federate... and there's an absurdly short message limit...
Getting lost in all this noise is Jack's willingness to have a conversation and also admit his product's shortcomings. How many other CEOs subject themselves to a similar, unscripted experiment? Kudos to Jack for being transparent and accessible.
I'm not sure what original goal Twitter had in mind. At the moment they appear to have 100+ millions of users and are valued in the billions of dollars. Even with the shortcomings and flaws people seem to use. Presumably people put up with the shortcomings and use it anyway. I found it funny that people went on Twitter to declare that they were deleting Facebook. I guess my main point is that whether intentionally or not Twitter has stumbled upon a formula that generally works. By that I mean people keep coming back to have their rant, to put someone else down, to share their joys, frustrations, sell their productions, etc
His responses sounded pretty scripted. To a question on what Twitter has specifically done to combat abuse on the platform (a question that's been asked over and over for years now):
1. We have evolved our polices.
2. We have prioritized proactive enforcement to remove burden from victims
3. We have given more control in product (like mute of accounts without profile pics or associated phone/emails)
4. Much more aggressive on coordinated behavior/gamingAlso this wasn't a real-time face to face conversation, so you can be sure
Aside from #3, all of these sounded like CEO-speak to me. No specifics, so nothing to attach personal responsibility to.
Interesting that he also just did a podcast with Joe Rogan where he had to field questions but this time by someone who isn't in tech or a journalist. Elon Musk also did the same. It provides far more value and something to take away than an awkward rapid fire back and forth on twitter
The main problem I have with Twitter is that when you reply to your own tweets, the reply will appear as a new tweet on your timeline.
This way your timeline becomes total chaos. Unless you only tweet a single 280 chars text and never add anything to it.
Otherwise, I would use it to post topics I am interested in. Reply to those topics to add more text or when new information becomes available. And have a discussion with people interested in those topics. I wish there was such a platform. It would be like everybody can run their own mini HN.
How about Wordpress? What you're describing sounds to me like the standard structure of a blog with comments.
Twitter is a weird sort of blog platform.
It is chaotic by design: the chaos is consequence of its distinguishing features. Everyone does get their own 'mini HN', i.e. a forum. But they lack the tools to rule over that forum. It's idealistically anarchic. Everyone's expected to get along peacefully, totally in public. There's no ownership over threads.
Wordpress is a tool to make websites. Yes, you can put your content on a website and then link to that from Twitter.
But that puts a big barrier in front of your content and the Twitter users. Visiting a website is usually a horrible experience. So people are very hesitant to do so. Click through rates from social media to websites are abysmal.
Good point. Users are willing to browse around Twitter (and Facebook) where the experience is consistent, tolerable. And functional enough for many kinds of content creators. They've achieved a sort of balance.
User hesitation to follow links out to the open web is lamentable, but wholly understandable.
Perhaps some 3rd party service with a recognisable URL could establish itself as a non-horrible, useful supplement to add extra structure to one's posts.
(Although I was suggesting something to use instead of Twitter, not something to use with it.)
I've always found Twitter to be a bit of a mess. Spam bots everywhere, and not a single cohesive line of thought that I can tune into. It feels unstructured and utterly disjointed, and whenever I'm forced to go on there, I can't wait to leave.
I wonder if they just pay famous people to use it and others follow?!
> Despite the public interview, and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn’t take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order,
I would have liked to make a higher effort post about twitter's UX, but if you want a platform that lets conversations happen, is there anything more important than this? They've done work to privilege the OP's responses, but giving one party that ability would seem even worse for conversation.
> It’s almost impossible to have a smart, healthy argument on Twitter because no one has the space needed to share their thoughts.
The article gives an example of each user trying to discuss and reply 4x branches of a conversation in 280 characters. At best, this can be mitigated on Twitter by "one person replies with a sequence of tweets", and the other then replies to that sequence.
I don't think brevity is the main reason for a lack of healthy arguments, though.
"smart, healthy arguing" is a hard game for people to play, so it's "almost impossible" to have anywhere. (Let alone on a site where replies are open to anyone who might have had a bad day and wants to vent, or whatever).
:-) Twitter's user-experience can also be quite different for users with different following / follower counts.
Twitter's whole experience is convoluted and it feels like either the developers didn't want to update the UI or were unable to, so features like DMs are handled through highly context sensitive means.
245 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadThis is a case of trying to force a use case on a platform that isn't designed for it.
Edit: It's getting very tiring to receive downvotes at every comment.
I'd be annoyed if my text messages started displaying out of order.
The only reason I know is because I'm going through a big project and the big stakeholders are frequently communicating via text messages as well as phone and email. I've considered moving us to WhatsApp but we're nearing the end so its not that annoying, we just know to use it less.
But then, can we really call it a conversation when potentially twitter user base is included in the event? It's more like lotsa people on a town square, shouting. Including the town idiots.
His recent interviews and (lack of) leadership have shown that he bludgeons no one, and the stubborn person is him. He's just an unusual kind of stubborn: unwilling to make any decision at all.
He also refuses to let inside forces impose order on it. He doesn't do anything at all. I would call Twitter a camel -- a horse designed by committee -- but it seems it's not even that. He apparently just consults committees ad infinitum and then does nothing.
> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
> <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
-- Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input...
Not that baseless insults should be encouraged.
I'm not quite so sure about that. Most people don't hurl insults face-to-face. If people acted like their twitter personalities IRL, I would expect to see a massive uptick in fistfights.
From taking public transit, waiting in bus stops and walking through blue collar neighborhoods most insults are either ignored or get another insult in return.
Possibly? Absolutely. The foundation of Twitter is the retweet. Without it, there is no sharing, and stuff can't 'go viral'. Most people don't insult each other, but they sure do like and retweet insults, false facts and other negative stuff ruining online communities.
Retweeting is the ultimate cop-out, because you didn't have the guts to say those things, but had no issue having it show up on your feed and those of your followers. You were just "sharing".
IRL, gobs of people are out insulting each other neither in the lower classes, nor in the upper classes. Yes, it happens MUCH more on a place like Twitter, but not at all IRL.
Now, I do hear indirect insults in white collar circles where they insult other people not present (for example berating working classes for the choices in life they make) but we’re not talking about indirect insults. We’re talking the ones where there is the potential for direct retaliation.
I think you're wrong. I think most people do hurl insults face-to-face. They just don't do it often. Most people, especially of the working class, can very easily get into these kinds of spats in the real world.
Sorry for the Daily Mail link but it looks like the mainstream press hasn't catch up on the subject. Afaik transphobia is not on the same level with "bomb threats or holocaust denial" but apparently people get arrested for it.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/10/police-wasting-t...
There's a culture war going on, trans people are the current wedge issue, and people like Boris are absolutely part of it.
Again, we need the underlying facts, which I suspect include a longer history of targeted harassment rather than a driveby twitter insult.
paganel, when you say "Sorry for the Daily Mail link" it sounds like you know you're citing a source that will be extremely untrustworthy on this topic, and then did it anyway.
"according to Miller on Wednesday this week, he found himself answering questions — for 34 minutes – from an officer from Humberside Police... On that account, Miller says things such as ‘trans women are not women’" https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/01/is-it-now-a-crime-to-l...
"In 2016, British police detained and questioned 3,300 people for making ‘offensive’ comments on social media " https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/11/will-making-jokes-abou...
Twitter is a broadcasting service, and you're responsible for how it is read. You don't get a pass because you totally didn't mean it that way. I can't get upset about this one.
2) & 3) Doesn't sound like arrest/prosecution? I don't doubt a lot of things got reported to police, and they followed up by talking to the person.
There does not need to be 100s of successful prosecutions a year for there not to be consequences of police action (whether it be warnings, being detained, arrests, prosecutions, jail) and for there to be serious chilling effects.
EDIT:
> You don't get a pass because you totally didn't mean it that way
I'm no lawyer, but isn't intent a critical part of analysing someone's actions in prosecution (and perhaps why Liberty mentioned it)?
Proving intention used to be the case, but I think a lot of speech laws being made aren't taking this into account, and this is incredibly dangerous. You used the words "gypped" or "scot-free"? Well, those terms are an implied racial (cultural really) slur.
"Hocus pocus" originally comes from Protestant mockery of the Latin words of Consecration from the Catholic Mass. Catholics could, in theory, be offended by that. (I'm Catholic, but I just see it as an interesting piece of historical linguistic trivia, although I know it wasn't always so).
You used the words or "niggardly" or "snigger"? Neither of which have any negative racial or cultural connotations. The first is of Scandanavian etymology, and the second is of Dutch etymology, but they sound a lot like a word that is insulting. If someone takes offense at your racial insult, when you were using a perfectly innocent word, can you use that as a defense? Will it matter when social media has already tried and executed you, and are marching for your punishment?
People are being arrested for using the wrong pronouns. There's no way it can matter whether that was intentional or not. Hate speech laws are defined based not on what someone does, but on how someone else reacts to it, and it's impossible to list all the ways it could be applied. For all we know, people can get into trouble for something that started out as a 4chan prank.
There's no way to prove it one way or another. Proving intention to murder or conspire can be made using physical evidence, but how can you prove you were doing it with or without malice aforethought?
Were you warned and then persisted in your behavior? OK, maybe that would count, but it could still be a slip of the tongue or a typo. This is about as Orwellian as it gets.
That's why hate speech laws, even the best intentioned, scare the crap out of me, not because I support hate-speech, or use it, but because I know that it's way to easy to turn them into a witchhunt, and to prosecute people for completely benign behavior.
Teenager was found guilty of "sending a grossly offensive message" because she cited lyrics of a song in memory of a dead friend.
Implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be offended" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of tyranny, which a lot of people seem to think is perfectly fine. Language changes, slang changes even faster, people like 4chan like to stir up trouble by showing how easy it is to manipulate the public perception. There's literally no way to define "hate speech" in an objective way without having to constantly modify the definition. And just as it is possible to be inadvertently guilty of "hate speech" because of ignorance (e.g., I didn't know the word "gyp" was a slur against Romani.) it's even more possible to engage in hate speech without using any of the explicitly proscribed language.
As an example, for this conversation, I'm going to define "grot" to be a racial slur against someone I am hypothetically prejudiced against. Does me calling someone a "grot" count as hate speech, when no one knows what it means? What if the word catches on among my friends (who are also hypothetical bigots) enough so that a common acquaintance knows what we mean when we use it. Does that count? How many people need to recognize this meaning of "grot" before it becomes something you can't say on TV? How many people need to recognize this meaning before you can be arrested in the U.K.? What if I can incite a crowd to violence by chanting "Grot!" over and over? Yeah, we'd all probably agree that's problematic speech, but where's the dividing line?
If you ask me, people who make "hate speech" laws are a bunch of grots because it's impossible to enforce them objectively and consistently.
Context matters. Saying otherwise is either uninformed or dishonest. Performing a song containing "the roof is on fire" is different than just yelling the phrase. And yes, how others perceive your behavior is partially your responsibility. Just like people might kill you in self-defense if they perceive you as threat, even in case your gun was just a theater prop.
Regarding your "where is the line"... communication always requires interpretation and there will never be an "objective and consistent" line. I'm sure i could easily rewrite your example to fit a law of every country in existence. As for the US, I could go for "Defamation Per Se", in other words were implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be talked bad about" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of blah blah blah
So yes, we will always argue about were line are drawn, just like others will try to overstep them without consequences. That's part of life.
In the UK we have the wonderful mix of various repressive speech offence laws [0] and an underfunded police force that like to scan Twitter
[0] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/free-spee...
I saw this TED talk by Jon Ronson from 2015 titled "When online shaming goes too far", largely a teaser for his book on the topic, but nevertheless rather sobering. Basically how we're all one tweet away from disaster.
NOTE: NSFW due to using quotes of "normal" discourse on Twitter.
The Twitter page I've cultivated has low/no rage and even interesting conversations. Sure, if I venture to gender, race, or politics, Ill be greeted by the rage machine. So volitionally choose to stay out of it.
Cultivate who you follow to a narrow tech field, and be very careful that whom you choose doesn't invest in hate and rage mechanics.
Facebook, for me, is the rage machine every few posts interspersed with cat/dog pics.
My Twitter use dropped off a cliff. The people I follow write interesting articles or give good talks, but are incredibly boring on Twitter, or retweet stuff that once more puts me face to face with the 'regular Twitter' dumpster fire.
"Microblogging" works for traffic or service updates, and commercials. Its use case narrows to almost nothing when it comes to human interactions, which require more substance than what a <textarea maxlength='280'> provides.
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1086735766997344261
To her credit, at least she apologized.
It's funny how the people who claim twitter, social media, etc are toxic are the ones creating the toxicity.
Twitter, like anything else, is a tool. If it is toxic for you, then it's mostly likely because you yourself is a toxic person.
The Covington Catholic School incident is a perfect example of made up news originating from Twitter.
But I guess all publicity is good publicity.
Isn't it on Twitter, you know the ones running and presumably most familiar with the platform, to request how the interview be done rather than for the interviewer to know the nuances themselves?
Well, yeah. And cars are a terrible way to travel across oceans. The world discovered this ages ago. Kids, back in my day we only had 140 ch
Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team?
Such a basic level of unfamiliarity with their own product gives me a lot of pause that he can do anything to guide the company on fixing rampant automated accounts or making it less of a frequently hostile forum.
Not a twitter user myself, but I've seen a lot of people use their twitter handles like they'd use an E-Mail address. They say "this is a twitter handle send me a DM if you want to talk with me" instead of "this is my E-Mail address please send me an E-Mail if you want to talk". So they do derive conversational value from twitter.
Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.
Delusion/hope/marketing?
I've found pretty much the same thing, just good for trading headlines & brief insights. Though, its constraints do cause me to improve the focus of some ideas to express them briefly and clearly, so that's a good exercise.
I think he knew it was going to fail, just not the many ways how it would.
Many people are knowingly doing a kabuki theatre version of a conversation where they are specifically trying to get attention and grab more followers and retweets. You can see it in how responses are framed. There's a lot of attempted "mic drop" moments.
Real people don't have conversations like that, because they're not playing to an audience. In real conversations, people also don't just walk away from each other at the first jab, but that happens on Twitter constantly.
It's similar to how 95% of Reddit's content is posted by 1% of its user base. Most Twitter users aren't tweeting, they're voyeurs to online meltdowns (real or orchestrated), celebrity gossip and slapfights between political commentators/media/trolls.
I have never understood how MySpace became unfashionable because it was "too gaudy/immature" while Twitter has been a wildfire of horrible UX, hate speech, bullying and user surveillance for over a decade now.
Although for Twitter, I think they absolutely know the site has a problem with toxicity, but they 100% do not care. Angry people will spend longer on the site arguing, post more, and see more ads. They may say they care, but their actual business incentives push them towards maintaining the current state of discourse.
Just in the last couple of weeks, he's been making himself available for long form discussions. He was on Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and other podcasts. He participated in this Kara interview.
He's been a bit more behind the scenes before, and now he's more visible and active and participatory. He doesn't have all the answers yet, but maybe this effort will lead to improvements.
However, even when I see people do what is effectively a long form blog post on Twitter, I often give up on it before the end because it’s too frustrating.
This is the only thing i've ever used Twitter for. It's the best place to find out about problems on my local transit system. Long before the company ever gives an alert, there'll dozens of people tweeting angrily about the problems.
Want a discussion? Allow comments and make them visually separate and less prominent just like blogs do.
And not all blog posts are one-way communication, just like you said, that is why we have comment systems attached to blog posts.
I understand why they did it. They let the site kind of grow organically to see what it could become and embraced how people were using it. And I think they are likely super nervous from a financial perspective about any user loss if they start pulling features.
But I think Twitter has a similar problem as Facebook -- it connects a lot of random people into a conversation system that should likely not be connected. On HN, I'm connecting with people that care about the tech community. On a Reddit sub-reddit, it's specific to some topic. Twitter just seems to encourage too many outliers to get involved in conversations they should probably sit back and simply listen on.
Perhaps what we really need is a million meeting rooms that people can enter or leave as they desire.
I don't use Twitter, but I do use Facebook to keep up with family and friends, but the primary value I get out of it is from the groups I belong to, often private, where people can have (moderated, if needed) discussions about topics of common interest.
They would easily test for this and fix it. They do not care.
It seems people shmooze and make big deals happen. But they have no idea how their own product works, often.
There are notable exceptions: Elon Musk. Warren Buffett. Jobs and Gates and Bezos. That’s why their companies rock.
But like, Apple after Jobs, not so much. I am not convinced the higher-ups really are in touch with what’s the main user facing issue. Like how Apple repeatedly allowed the entire Mac app store certificates to just expire leaving all apps broken [1], or how they released an iOS where no one could click a link in safari!! [2]
But that’s actually still a very high level of competence of tons of people in the company. Just the executives and lack of processes to catch this surprise me.
Google doesn’t have such problems. It only has problems of product roadmap, shuttering Google Reader and Google Plus after making the entire userbase embrace it, or replacing Talk with three different products like Hangouts, Allo, Meet, etc.
But most of all I just realized how much successful B-level people are just... well, they make so many spelling mistakes in email, often paint by numbers and don’t really think out of the box on the most basic things the way someone would if they were constantly learning about their space and their problem. Like oh A and B don’t go together? I guess it won’t work out. Oh, just one tiny thing had to be tweaked in B and suddenly we have a huge revenue stream coming? Huh, would you look at that. And here I was about to focus on something else.
Has anyone else noticed this? I am not sure if it was always the case or think it’s a general sense of ADD that came over the business world. Hardly anyone reads books. Emails have to be 5-7 lines long. Spelling and grammar mistakes make you seem important. People - especially busy businesspeople - dont have time to read 2 lines of instructions when onboarding - they zip past them and then scratch their head what to do on next screen. I have seen it.
Is this the prequel to Idiocracy?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped... and teo years later it happens again https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-deve...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-sa...
They aggressively optimize for a panoply of metrics that make them appealing to advertisers. Often this means hacking the algorithms governing the interactions between users (viewership, timeline visibility, feed) until the outcome yields satisfying metrics, meaningful or not.
At this point a complex web of chaotic feedback loops has formed and it becomes hard to change anything. The system's stateful complexity far exceeds the engineering/product team's understanding of it. It's like trying to debug a neural network.
Of course not. It's boilerplate CEO speak. It's a way of "answering" the question without making any commitments and seems to terminate any further discussion.
Joe Rogan and Sam Harris discuss this on Joe Rogans podcast #1241
I literally don't know how to write a sentence with more than one asterisk in on HN, and I've been here several years. Formatting is hard but Reddit at least follows a known standard and has a "formatting help" link right under the comment box if you need it.
---
Come to think of it, is there a definitive guide to HN comment formatting? Implementing a preview feature in [1] would be doable if the markup is documented.
[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
It's hidden behind the FAQ.
This is a solved problem. Word solved it back in 1990.
Regarding rich text editors for the web, surely there must be one that's ok after all these years.
Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.
I agree that Usenet is fantastic for discussion, too bad it fell out of popularity...
By index, I mean a threaded list of messages that one can scroll through without having the message body present. In an email/news client, you would typically see something like:
in one window pane. Then you could click on one of the the messages and the body would be displayed in another window pane. Scrolling through that index is much faster than having to scroll through a lot of comments on reddit or Hacker News. And finding a new message was simply looking for ones that were in bold font.Seems like neither side were being self aware in this case.
I'm also not sure exactly what the product problem is with Twitter. The only exposure I have to a group of people upset about Twitter are the folks that Joe Rogan had on his podcast, and their complaints are just that it's toxic.
However Twitter unlike Google and Facebook is the least functional as a utility, so refraining from using it if you don't like it seems like a no brainer. You're not losing anything functional
When someone is being doxxed, and mobs are forming, it's usually happening on that platform.
I don't think I've ever seen the same on Twitter, ever. It usually devolves into something worse.
I do think there are parallels between Reddit and Twitter that encourage a level of snark that is just never appropriate when talking to a human in real life, unless you know them well.
It's why the "happy birthday" messages in Facebook have always felt so hollow (especially because facebook is really nudging you to do it), but those same words sent via text message to the person are received differently (or even via Messenger within Facebook).
I don't think this is the case. It became influential in certain circles, but there are many people who don't use Twitter. It became a circlejerk too quickly.
Speakers would define the hash tag at the start, and then many would project the post stream up front and respond to questions or comments from the feed on stage. The audience would also discuss what was being said amongst themselves.
It’s really just too big and too public for that to work anymore. It almost needs a feature where posting to a certain hashtag requires a password or being a certain user, then the 2 of them could’ve posted to that hashtag exclusively and been the only thing in the feed, and easily followed.
Obvious problem there is that hashtags don’t really scale like that, but it gives you some sense for strategies they might take to tackle the issue.
...this is better somehow?
It begins to become a bit hollow, like Zuckerberg saying they’ve made mistakes and need to do better.
1. We have evolved our polices.
2. We have prioritized proactive enforcement to remove burden from victims
3. We have given more control in product (like mute of accounts without profile pics or associated phone/emails)
4. Much more aggressive on coordinated behavior/gamingAlso this wasn't a real-time face to face conversation, so you can be sure
Aside from #3, all of these sounded like CEO-speak to me. No specifics, so nothing to attach personal responsibility to.
This way your timeline becomes total chaos. Unless you only tweet a single 280 chars text and never add anything to it.
Otherwise, I would use it to post topics I am interested in. Reply to those topics to add more text or when new information becomes available. And have a discussion with people interested in those topics. I wish there was such a platform. It would be like everybody can run their own mini HN.
Twitter is a weird sort of blog platform.
It is chaotic by design: the chaos is consequence of its distinguishing features. Everyone does get their own 'mini HN', i.e. a forum. But they lack the tools to rule over that forum. It's idealistically anarchic. Everyone's expected to get along peacefully, totally in public. There's no ownership over threads.
But that puts a big barrier in front of your content and the Twitter users. Visiting a website is usually a horrible experience. So people are very hesitant to do so. Click through rates from social media to websites are abysmal.
User hesitation to follow links out to the open web is lamentable, but wholly understandable.
Perhaps some 3rd party service with a recognisable URL could establish itself as a non-horrible, useful supplement to add extra structure to one's posts.
(Although I was suggesting something to use instead of Twitter, not something to use with it.)
I don't think anyone would complain that making blog updates in Slack via pinned messages is difficult.
I wonder if they just pay famous people to use it and others follow?!
I would have liked to make a higher effort post about twitter's UX, but if you want a platform that lets conversations happen, is there anything more important than this? They've done work to privilege the OP's responses, but giving one party that ability would seem even worse for conversation.
The article gives an example of each user trying to discuss and reply 4x branches of a conversation in 280 characters. At best, this can be mitigated on Twitter by "one person replies with a sequence of tweets", and the other then replies to that sequence.
I don't think brevity is the main reason for a lack of healthy arguments, though. "smart, healthy arguing" is a hard game for people to play, so it's "almost impossible" to have anywhere. (Let alone on a site where replies are open to anyone who might have had a bad day and wants to vent, or whatever).
:-) Twitter's user-experience can also be quite different for users with different following / follower counts.