> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.
Anyone who's in a position to use Tweetdeck instead of Twitter's web UI will find a free, Twitter-maintained, product with no annoying algorithms and no advertising.
It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc.
I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating.
I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
_Maybe_ if they removed all their weird gating and order logic and presented tweets as a list of time ordered events that match the hashtag you're searching for (including user sources) and have another tab for tweets people you're following have retweeted and for tweets in your subject that were popular then they'd fix it...
Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
Even IF it was relevant sometimes/mosttimes/alltimes... Why would you ever allow someone else to choose what you see?
Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions?
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
Algorithmic feeds are, in all cases, Satan's handiwork. What I want is to see posts from the individuals I have selected, interleaved in chronological order, with no tampering.
It's frustrating that this is the general trend today. I was using the Reddit app the other day and pruning my list of subreddits to reduce distraction when I'm in the app. Of course the app will still insert suggested subreddits in my feed. And then there are the streaming services that recommend (and auto-play) shows and movies to you.
Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
I agree. As soon as there is any tampering of what information is being displayed, users have a difficult time understanding why they are seeing it and ultimately find it less enjoyable to use.
Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
If that maximized user engagement, then that is the UI they would present. The fact that they don't do that should tell you that their tests have shown algorithmic feeds are more engaging for users.
"User engagement" is not a single, well-defined, easily measurable thing.
For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.
But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
You could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own authority to justify their actions.
It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.
I think something like this circular logic is actually useful, and in some sense true. It might better phrased as "companies which usually make bad financial decisions die, so the decisions of a company which hasn't died are probably financially beneficial." Further qualifiers could be added to account for longevity of a company (we might put more faith in a company which has spent longer not dying), earning reports, and the fact that a good decision isn't necessarily beneficial (just probabilistically so given available knowledge), but the basic reasoning seems valid.
If the feed shows me a pseudo-random sample of recent tweets, and each time I refresh I get a slightly different view, of course I'm going to keep refreshing to see if there's anything new or anything that I haven't been shown yet. But most of the time, I just keep seeing the same thing over and over. Imagine if your email client did this.
Wikipedia's costs are extremely small relative the service usage. They don't have a lot of active development (relatively), and they don't need a ton of expensive infrastructure (relatively). Twitter's annual operating costs are in the $2+ billions. Wikipedia's are in the ~$60 millions. Not to say a non-profit twitter couldn't exist - this just feels like an unfair comparison. Just because two services are popular tech services doesn't mean they are apples to apples to operate.
We have an example of a service similar to twitter that's effectively free to run due to it's distributed nature in Mastodon/ActivityPub. Being financially sustainable without having to resort to dark patterns could just be an engineering question.
Dorsey has done three recent podcasts (two on JRE, one on Tales From the Crypto) where he states that he thinks there will be a decentralised blockchain based Twitter competitor in the future. I've taken that as a given for years, but to hear the CEO spell it out in public is pretty crazy. He wasn't even cornered into it, but rather brought the topic up himself.
I read that as Dorsey pandering to the audience. There is no room for a blockchain-based twitter competitor, because there is no sensible application of blockchain to the domain.
In 2019 you're more or less correct, but only due to cost and time constraints. Short-form public messaging on the blockchain already exists[0], it's just prohibitively expensive and slow. Imagine a blockchain with cheap, fast transactions. This should be harder to censor than other distributed solutions like a federated network or a similar scheme hosted on IPFS since you're taking the whole chain with you in the event of censorship, whereas the other schemes allow just the hosts of particular data to be targeted. Even before the economics work for full-on blockchain twitter, we might see a cheaper blockchain/IPFS hybrid where at least some metadata is censorship resistant. Unless the government wins the war on information, I'm reasonably convinced that a better blockchain twitter is coming.
I'm sure a gigantic portion of Twitter's operating costs are the once necessary to monetize their users. I have a feeling the product that is for the users would be much closer to Wikipedia-level costs.
I follow a few hundred people with very varied interests, and I don't log in every few minutes. For non-addicted people, the algo is pretty nice. I want to see a sampling of interesting stuff I "missed" over the last day or two. If I want to go look at a particular person's chronological feed, I can do that.
You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.
Have you ever tried Twitter lists? I find that having separate streams for "irl friends", "professional network", "people I might want to hire", etc. makes it easy to dip in, get a sense of what's up with that particular set of people/accounts, and then go about my day.
Try doing that, and find out how many times Twitter helpfully resets you to go back 'home' - a home which they feel they own and control. I press that button about once a week to go back to a chronological feed.
I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.
There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
Once a week? Lucky you, I have to set it to "Latest Tweets" almost every time I open the app. It even reminds me to set my "Content Preferences" every time I do it, just to ignore them over and over again. Helpful.
And the option to choose the algorithmic filtering based on my needs, in the rare cases that the number of individuals or volume of their tweets may be too large to take in chronologically.
What I really dislike is the spam in the notifications section. If someone likes my tweet, replies to it or retweets it, that's relevant. I don't however want to see a notification for something Tweeter deems interesting under other people you follow liked/retweed this as a notification.
What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless.
Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually really like this feature. I'm usually not able to get to everything, so it's great to know when something important or interesting got tweeted and I know to check it out.
That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
But what if most people like it? I have to say I think it makes a lot of sense. If a high number of people I follow like something, you might want to show it to me too.
That's kind of the point though - I had no idea this feature existed until they started pushing it to me. I think it's too much to expect users to opt-in to things. How would I have known to opt-in to this? Yet I am now much happier because they improved the UX for me.
I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.
If you put it on a single, easily recognizable, easily accessible page (all new features, etc.), then many users will find it. You can even give a notification when a new feature is added (as long as kept to a reasonable amount).
Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
You overestimate what people will understand from a technical description in a configuration option. Even if they were experimentally inclined, which most people are not, they probably wouldn't even notice the effect, particularly if not a new user. Twitter is a black box for most users.
Twitter very likely did market research on its effectiveness for the target market they were trying to please. Probably that's just not you.
I don't use Twitter, except to look at tweets that people on HN or whatever link to. And the main reason that I don't is that the idea of "following" just doesn't work for me. I tried it. But even people who sometimes post stuff that interests me mostly post stuff that just gets in my way.
I like HN. But I never look at particular users' posts. I just look at the front page, or sometimes at the comments list, so see what people are talking about.
Agreed. I wish that they would just mix those into the primary feed. I keep using the "See less often" option, but the "Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your experience better." message that I get in response almost feels like a taunt at this point.
+1000 This completely ruins using Twitter as an official support channel for a business. I want to be notified immediately whenever my company is mentioned, but enabling email/push notifications so that I'm aware of these asap also means constantly opening Twitter just to dismiss whatever unsolicited spam they're trying to put in front of me. It adds up to quite a lot of wasted time and is a downright obnoxious user experience--in the end I had to disable the notifications and our response times suffer for it. At this point I would definitely pay to have these irrelevant notifications removed.
This is an honest question - why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business? If I had a business, I would respond to Twitter support requests with “please see our support website for how to contact us” or “thanks, we are now contacting you.” I don’t know why Twitter users should get better support and it seems odd to me to rely on Twitter to provide or to ask for support.
That's a funny one. I worked at a place where the support team that worked for the social network accounts of the company had better tools and higher priority when doing their jobs than the phone/site support team, so effectively customers asking for support on Twitter or Facebook got better and faster support than customers asking for support on the phone or the site. I assume that's because companies are terrified of bad publicity on social networks.
Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.
Close. It benefits a subset of users: that subset whose first reaction to having a problem with a company is not to calmly and rationally contact them and see what kind of remedy can be made, but to blast it to the whole world, saying “my supreme pizza had green peppers on it, PizzaBlarg is terrible and should go bankrupt”.
You do customer support via social media for the same reason you do PR and marketing on social media: because that’s where your customers are! People spend a lot of time on social media.
Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.
This is flawed thinking. Surely you're not proposing to implement every support channel your users might want to use? People are generally happy to use designated channels, as long as it's discoverable, easy to use and effective.
People will call you out on Twitter. You likely have a brand account on Twitter already so you'll already get those mentions. Even if you don't have an account people will create a hashtag.
If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.
The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.
Because it's cheaper than having an actual support hotline and easier to ignore than having email.
And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.
Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?
To put it bluntly -- the prevailing mindset is that customer support is a cost-centre. It's hard to reliably measure customer satisfaction, so its value is misunderstood.
And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?
Which is partly because the business model is selling data to large companies and data brokers, not providing a service to the "customers" (users). And then you get places like Facebook that are themselves data brokers, and sell access to the data so they can claim they aren't Acxiom.
Twitter has been the absolute best way for me to get actual support from Australia Post and Telstra*
Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.
As a consumer, if a company with a Twitter presence responds that way I'll ignore them. Because 9 times out of 10 when I tweet at a brand it's either because I'm calling them out for actively harmful stuff (like using plaintext passwords) or prodding them about issues that likely affect more people than just me.
If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.
I really hate when a company lists "Support Email" address and never replies to it. Dozens of companies did this to me (sent from my gmail). And yet in horrible and unusable twitter or slightly less horrible facebook they reply in hours, or even minutes.
why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business?
Note that the poster said "an official support channel" rather than "the official support channel". Adding more ways for customers to contact support is usually a good thing. There was no mention of taking away other channels that you might prefer.
Right--most of our support is done via email, but we also use Github issues, chat via our website, and Twitter. Which one gets used depends on the customer and what the issue is. I try to make sure that we respond as soon as possible regardless of the channel, but Twitter usually ends up being slower (unfortunately) because of the notification issues.
I'm always surprised by these threads expressing frustration at the timelines being re-arranged - then I remember I use a 3rd party client (Tweetbot) and that's why my timeline is not molested and spam-filled.
If they ever fully disable 3rd party clients that will be the day I cancel my account. I thought forced ads as you started a DVD were obnoxious...
They're certainly going that way. Group DMs don't work with the API (in that there's not even a "hey log onto the website your client doesn't support this" notification). A ton of features have been removed from or gimped in the API, to the point where many of the third-party devs have given up.
"Fully disable" - probably not. But they'll certainly make it nearly impossible to produce something "like the Twitter app but better".
Agreed. They have a useless option "see less of this", which has absolutely no effect.
My approach is now to unfollow any user when Twitter forces a notification from them. Maybe someone with some brains at Twitter will notice the clear pattern and fix their idiotic notifications.
I don't quite get why you can't disable these notifications at all. I really don't want to see the things I missed or it finds interesting. And they're purposefully pushing you to look at it to dismiss those notifications.
This would suit me, actually. I use twitter almost exclusively to follow motor racing journalists. However, because of this, I have to dig through the same journalist's opinions on Brexit, FIFA, or Game of Thrones. It would suit me much better to be able to follow 'motorsport' as a topic instead of specific people.
During the Joe Rogan podcast, he mentioned that what they are trying to attempt to give people the "other side" of the story rather than promoting creation of echo chambers.
I think Farage is a moron and I couldn't disagree with him more, but what a disappointingly closed-minded view you have. That view is one of the worst problems of Twitter, in my opinion.
I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
Knowing what "Farage" is does not mean I wont debate properly with other political views.
Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
"Here we have a climatologist, and for balance, someone who believes the Earth is a computer simulation, and another who is certain it's flat and was created by the Illuminati who are alien lizards."
I'm doubtful of whatever sort of nonsense philosophical rationalization Dorsey comes up regarding how he thinks users should use, and should want to use the service. It's likely this:
> And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising.
I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
As far as I can tell the real motivation for so many feed based services doing this is just that if you stick enough irrelevant non ad shit in users feeds the ads will blend in better. None of these companies will ever publicly admit that that's the intention though.
Although I seem to be in the minority, yeah, I've been pretty happy with the recommendations they give me recently.
It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.
For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
I recently created a Twitter account, mostly as an experiment. I just followed some programmers, stuck to programming content. Immediately and every day after, I was constantly being displayed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, etc. Not a single politician or voice not on the left. Considering how powerful Twitter has become, this is troubling. I know this is just one anecdote, wondering what the rest of HN sees...
I used to be annoyed about how a lot of the programmers I followed on Twitter would tweet about politics and feminism.
Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality".
Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
Programmers are usually very vocal leftists. I've always assumed that those who don't speak openly about politics don't care or are right wingers, but who knows.
Right-wingers are plenty vocal. It's just that Twitter is not necessarily what they use to vocalize their views, for reasons that are probably obvious.
I think video game players are probably actually left-leaning on average. GamerGate seems to have created massive misunderstandings on all sides of the issues. (And no, I'm not defending it or denying things that occurred.)
Game players yes. Prominent gaming channels are a mixed bag though. "Bro culture" is very much a thing and casual homophobia and racism is still very widespread.
I'd say "liberal" is a more accurate descriptor than "left-leaning". I'd call PewDiePie liberal but not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, for example.
This is what you see even if you follow nothing or if you only follow stuff clearly associated with the right.
When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it.
If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
Sure, but that will no longer be twitter, it'll be a reddit competitor. He should then also state what will make it better than reddit, from what he's public ally saying so far it just sounds like he's never heard of reddit and is going to invent it.
It's already a reddit competitor to some extent. I agree that it will be more of a reddit competitor, but it's already on the continuum. These things are mushy.
> I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
I use twitter specifically because it's focused on people and not interests. I love learning more about the history of communist mapping because somebody who I followed after meeting them at a conference tweeted about it.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
I think it's impossible to re-think Twitter and satisfy everyone. I completely switched who I follow (using Lists) twice already based on my interest changes in technology. First Rails, then iOS, now "crypto". I was early enough in the first two communities to know who the movers and shakers were. However it took me a while to find who is worth following in "Crypto Twitter". So I personally welcome any attempts to show me relevant content from folks I don't follow yet in the field.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts
This is probably true for the majority of Twitter's users, but this is completely the opposite of what I want. Even with aggressively pruning the list of people I follow, I still feel the need to maintain topical lists with few people on them. (One of them is literally called "interesting" - it's for people who don't post often, but whose tweets I'm very interested in seeing, in chronological order, and don't want to lose in the shuffle and retweets and random shit twitter tries to inject into my stream.)
Networks are trying to move away from long tail content since it is so expensive to moderate. I think in next 10 years expect social networks and video playing websites to become much like network television. Ie there will be a vetted list of large creators, and everyone else will be a consumer. To do that you need to take away peoples ability to control exactly whom they follow / subscribe to.
I understand the economic and legal pressure for this to happen, but how would that make social networks anything other than mass market gatekeepers, like newspapers and TV networks once were?
Wasn't the attraction that you could follow someone who matched your interests, like "antique model steam engine refurbishment", or whatever niche interest an individual might have? If twitter had a vetted list of large creators, they'd be right back in the "all of this network content is lowest-common-denominator dreck" situation that ABC/CBS/NBC were in circa 1985. Which may not be a bad thing for society as a whole (we can have an agreed-upon set of facts again! No alternate facts!), but why did we go through 30 years of media upheavals and the loss of the good things about newspapers and TV (equal time doctrine) to get back there? Was this all just about creating a different set of media moguls?
I think the "antique model steam engine refurbishment" is where we go off the tracks with social media.
If you are single mindedly contented with some obscure niche you have so many wonderful options today because nothing is easier to advertise to than groups with really specific interests that require buying things.
What's lacking is well rounded, pleasant experiences. I'm not a collection of discrete interests and I definitely don't want to become one nor am I interested in meeting one.
There's literally a scifi story about this scenario; a society creates enough "TV networks" to appeal to everyone. (They weren't TV networks, but close enough for this discussion.)
Except they made a mistake, and one person slipped through the net, and was completely miserable and driven insane by this.
To answer your actual question, I bet most social networks would be perfectly fine with just being mass market gatekeepers. It's expensive to have 100,000 newspapers and TV networks to appear customized enough for everyone watching; but it's cheap to have 100,000 versions of Facebook's wall, or Reddit's front page.
Why can’t a network have self moderation at a global and local level? Reddit does this to an extent, with each community having its own separate moderation and culture, and the front page which is curated from a list of communities. The trick is have a moderation bottleneck, the curation, between the local and global stages.
Because as a CEO you dont want to wake up every day to headlines that you are profiting off exploitation of children / nazis / hatecrimes. A probabilistic filter of best effort moderation does not cut it from a CEOs point of view. The world at large and the media makes a huge hue and cry (often for justifiable reasons) when objectionable hateful content is found on a large network. If you are a CEO you want to bring the possibility of that down to zero. The only way to do that is via dealing with large established players with whom you have signed contracts. Reddit does get this right more than most other places but there are parts of Reddit that Jack might not want to defend in front of Congress. In fact more than Congress, there is an even bigger constituency - advertisers like Kelloggs, Disney, Cadburys. These tier1 brands want a family friendly image and dont want their content shown next to anything possible objectionable. Jacks job is to reassure Disney that their ad will never run next to a tweet that propagates hate crime. How does Jack give this guarantee?
> Networks are trying to move away from long tail content
This concisely expresses many of my misgivings with the Internet today. Things have been dumbed down and often cater to the lowest common denominator that people share. Evolutionarily speaking, it's chasing after low-hanging fruit (cheap and easy) and then hyper-optimizing for it to the point that it's all that remains. The problem is that it's sterile and dumbed down.
I don't like that we can't customize things or get out of the sandbox anymore now that everything has been siloed. With email and RSS we could construct filters and programmatically access our data. We could change the interface, query, backup, share.
The platform powers that be are dictating how today's internet works. They're taking away our browser tech (Chrome everywhere, increasingly without add-ons). We can't export our data in meaningful formats.
This is the hell future 1990's Microsoft could only dream of.
We all have the same problem, but if all the tweets are from interesting people, the ads stand out from the high quality content too much, and the ad clicks go down. This is why there won't be any for profit company who would implement real user following :(
I don't think it is true for the majority of Twitter's active users. It may be true for people who aren't using Twitter yet. Or it may just be something they need to make it easier to get users to engage with ads.
For whatever reason, Jack feels like he needs this to make Twitter more money and is trying to sell it as a benefit for active users. But it's really pissing on the active userbase and claiming that it's raining.
Not just that: by trying to decouple the content you see from the people you choose it makes specific people leaving Twitter less meaningful. I don't really engage on Twitter so I'm only there to follow a few people, if they left I'd leave.
This is an attempt to keep that dynamic from forming in the first place.
A common theme really. Just look at youtube´s "notification bell" and forced un-subbing. These social networks are going out of their way to be classified as publishers rather than platform providers. It´s going to bite them and us all in the ass so freaking hard and Jack, Mark and Susan will deserve everything that is to come their way both from regulators as well as users that will _eventually_ be fed up with these shady practices.
It's really weird to me how I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast interview of Ben Shapiro and he made that same comment and I found myself agreeing with.. Ben Shapiro. But if the social media magnates are going to try and become publishers and not platforms, which they are by curating what is printed on their sites as much as any editor of any newspaper, then I don't think they realize what they have coming.
Or possibly worse, we don't realize that it's exactly what the government wants.
I don't understand why Twitter hasn't implemented some kind of reputation gradient that would allow users to filter by levels.
Yes, I realize they are tricky to implement and subject to abuse but imagine you got points for using your real name, real photo, demerits for insults etc, then users could filter out hordes of trolls and gutter nonsense and instead focus on the meaningful conversations that do actually occur there -- the verified checkmark is a proto-version of this.
Instead they rely solely on blacklisting, which is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Even HN has a more sophisticated system, where users can be shadow banned or have their comments appear lower than normal.
Not sure how useful this macro-scale philosophizing by Dorsey on Twitter itself is for delivering new, useful features to users. Serious question: has Twitter released any new, major features in the last 2-3 years?
I'd like that as well. Make the process so anybody can be verified then let me configure my client to only show stuff from verified users.
I'd like to see them try other things too. One of the nice features in G+ was that the owner of a thread (the originator) could delete replies. I think that could work nicely in Twitter too.
> One of the nice features in G+ was that the owner of a thread (the originator) could delete replies. I think that could work nicely in Twitter too.
Interesting; I think adding this feature without changing anything else would severely exacerbate the already intolerable echo-chamber effect. Sure, trolling and abuse would lose visibility, but so would even slightly contrary opinions. Thought bubbles would shrink even further, and the platform would become even less enjoyable. (Context: I'm a light Twitter user, reading ~10 min/day and sending 1-2 tweets/month)
Take Maggie Haberman, NYT reporter. Her Twitter replies are always a cesspool...what if she could lock down her tweets so only a whitelisted group of users (say people she follows) could comment? You'd still (hopefully) get contrary opinions but none of the dreck that dominates her feed now.
I don't know if that's the answer. But I don't see Twitter even trying, just Dorsey waxing philosophical about it.
What I call "Twitter Communities" is my answer to that problem. Invite only groups. The world can read but only group members can post to the group. Otherwise exactly like Twitter currently is. You can create a community and invite people to it and then when you post you either post to a community or global, everything still appears in your feed but you can filter down to just a certain community posts.
Personally I don't consider real name or real photo to be much of an asset of any of the circles I was in on Twitter. In fact, in my experience the ones with real name/real photo (or what seemed that way) were generally the least interesting posters. They were never willing to put out their own opinion, especially on controversial topics. In fact, in the kind of groups I was in (let's say political activism), having your real details on there is anything but an asset.
Not having a real name on Twitter isn't even a good heuristic for anything.
In a lot of circles, a Twitter profile with a "real photo" as the profile picture usually means you're looking at a spambot with a profile picture scraped from either Facebook or a dating site.
It's not a good heuristic for unique opinions -- sure (see: LinkedIn, the most horrifyingly boring social network feed). But it is if you want to filter out hate speech, which a lot of people do.
But my point is not real photos/names as the be-all, end-all. How about many heuristics, and let users filter accordingly? All this data available and none of it is used to improve the user experience, at least as far as I can tell.
HN has such low volume that it can be centrally curated by a few people who enforce policies like "no flame bait -- and I'll know it when I see it." Or, for example, when someone writes a quick attack on HN, they are encouraged to flesh out their point with substance which is something that Twitter fundamentally discourages.
It's hard for me to see any way forward for Twitter. By design, it amplifies the worst characteristics of humans from tribalism to outrage fetishism.
For instance, even if you configured Twitter to never see posts from the opposing cultural faction or trolls (usually used as synonyms), the people you follow will retweet/quote them and bring them back into your feed.
Your point about Twitter's scale is fair, but I personally don't think the situation is hopeless, as you seem to suggest.
If you have troll engagers in your feed, unfollow them. But right now I have no way of filtering replies...it's frustrating. No system is perfect but let's at least TRY to improve the status quo.
If Twitter is consistently beta-testing new features to improve the quality of the UX/tweet replies, I personally am not seeing it.
It's like how you can /ignore someone on IRC and phpbb, but nobody actually does. They only threaten it. Hell yes they want to be clued in when you open your mouth so they can bark back! Humans love it.
Look how many people waste their time responding to Donald Trump's tweets with things like "RESIGN!" They could unfollow Trump. But they choose to spend their precious time on earth bickering about Trump because it's pure entertainment.
What also happens though is that we kinda know this. The more astute/introspective people will realize Twitter isn't bringing out the best in us. Sam Harris lamented this a while back and was able to quit Twitter for a couple days before being driven back to the crack.
I find myself doing this on HN too. Ever read a headline like "Javascript sucks", know the arguments you'll find in the HN comments, and click in to respond to one? The whole reason I'm here is to socialize, so I don't think filtering can be very effective. I'm not going to filter out the very things that draw me like the opportunity to call someone out on the internet, which is the same reason why nobody uses the ignore feature on forums.
Nobody would use the block feature on Twitter if it didn't tell the other person you blocked them.
There are some bugs in basic human psychology that I'm not so sure technology is ready to solve. Maybe this is the Great Filter that no civilization can surpass in the Fermi paradox.
The block function makes it inconvenient for trolls to read your tweets and impossible for them to RT them for a pile on. It's a "last resort" before moving to a protected account (which can't be RTd at all)
As I mention in another reply -- I'm not saying this filtering would result in the most interesting feed, but it's frustrating you can't filter your feed at all.
If some people want more interesting opinions, great. If others want more bland but less abuse, also great. Right now you can't filter for anything and most of tweet replies are a giant waste of time.
Becuase you might not like - or they might not want you to see things that are popular.
How much would you complain if your Twitter feed was filled with Trump tweets? Better yet, how much would they not like that!? - Sorry though it's based on reputation levels and his is up there relative to non-famous users.
I think the features themselves aren't ground breaking on their own, but I'm willing to believe they do a lot of large scale semantic text analysis (eg for abuse prevention) which is innovative at least from an infrastructure standpoint and their size
wouldn't it be incredibly easy for this kind of system to be abused by opposing cliques? erroneous mob reporting is already common enough, giving aggrieved parties the ability to do cumulative damage to someone seems like it would only amplify that behavior.
>Instead they rely solely on blacklisting
twitter has implemented very heavy handed throttling as well in order limit the reach of users deemed unsavory. whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate.
in some sense i wonder if these networks have simply become too generalized to be moderated effectively in a manner that satisfies all of the different facets of the userbase.
Mr. Dorsey accurately answered the Nazi question with:
> “We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”
Looks like we're in store for more random casting about for optimizations from those at the helm. I expect this continue until the service is an unrecognizable, unusable mush of content with zero signal to noise for what matters.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
So reddit.
If you stick to smaller, interested based subs, reddit is a far superior product because it has human moderators and threading. The "breaking news" aspect of Twitter is extremely oversold imo, but people post things just as quickly on reddit.
I always tell people if they sign up for reddit, to immediately unsubscribe from the defaults and to specifically search for and subscribe to communities they may be interested in such as a subreddit for the city/state they live in or for any career interest or hobbies they have.
Between the censorship on /news and /worldnews who argue "no US politics... unless it's an anti-Trump circlejerk", the straight up lunatics on /politics. The unfunny on /funny. The boobs on /gaming... which I'm not actually complaining about. Everything photoshopped to hell on /pics. Unbashed propoganda on /science. Gullible fools on /futurology. /television /movies /music falling for every PR created "news" put out... No Thank You.
/ECE /ReverseEngineering /gundeals /programming are OK though.
FWIW if something "world news" level happens, first thing I do is check twitter hashtags.
TV news and online news sites usually lag behind and rarely fact-check the "breaking news" so they're generally only worth paying attention days or weeks later when all the fact checking is done. If they're up to date, they're mostly recycling other people's content from social media without attributing any sources or real fact checking. If they're not recycling social media they're generally so vague and non-committal that they basically tell you nothing.
When the Notre Dame fire broke out the only thing I saw on TV was a short matter-of-fact notice in the evening news. Social media had live streams and people linking to articles about the renovations etc.
Organizations will eventually realize they can stand up their own social infrastructure (see ActivityPub).
It'll be interesting to see how Jack Dorsey reacts to that.
Edit: if anyone happening to read this works for Twitter or has the capability to pass a message to @jack, here's a free idea for a pivot to your business model:
Offer hosted ActivityPub federation utilizing your existing Twitter platform. In other words, become the "Google Apps for Your Domain/G Suite" for hosted ActivityPub instances. Media organizations, governments, and celebs should be paying a premium for the content hosting you provide today for free.
> “It’s democracy at stake, it’s our culture at stake,” Anderson said.
Christ, the self-importance of the Twitterverse is astonishing. What they don't say out loud is that Trump and Brexiteers and others they oppose have used the platform to effectively end-run the media, they hate that, but they can't figure out a way to stop them. A little bit of plain speaking would be refreshing.
Be happy that today it's not life on this planet or the universe itself that is at stake. ;)
In my experience, there are primarily three kinds of people that regularly claim there's a lot on the line, and it doesn't matter what their political views are. 1) young people that are inexperienced, 2) people that need to feel good about fighting for something important, and 3) people that exploit the other two by appealing to that. It's a good tactic to motivate your base, but like crying wolf, it loses it's effectiveness when done too often.
More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century, making predictions of that correct. Obviously neither life nor the universe have ended as many times in that period.
Furthermore, I know of no well informed people that have ever predicted the later but many who have successfully predicted the former.
I'd be mildly interested to see a list of these failed democracies. My other question is, did they fail because Twitter allowed unfettered tweeting of all kinds of unsavory thoughts and ideas? Or are they places where most people don't know what Twitter is?
Edit: It also begs the question of whether democracy is the best form of government for every country, but I leave that aside, since I'm not sure we've reached agreement on whether Twitter is really that important or influential in the lives of governments and societies.
> More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century
Is "the party I prefer has lost the election" the same as "a democracy has fallen"? Because I really don't see a dozen democracies that left democracy behind, and certainly not many times that. I suppose it depends on your definition of democracy, but for anything close to the common understanding of a modern liberal democracy, that just sounds ridiculous.
If I can't google programming-related search terms and get back a publicly facing page for that tweet, then I'd consider the site as dead as G+ for research purposes.
We need to stop useful community content from getting black holed into walled gardens of Eternal September.
Excuse my outburst, but I'm wondering when these social network algorithms are going to realize: I don't follow "interests", I follow PEOPLE.
If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news website already.
It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in vaguely similar stuff that people in other rooms are saying, and then sorts all messages in order of whoever is the most popular or says the most relevant keywords.
By making it more of an interest-based network, they further increase the interest-based siloing of users, making interest-based advertising more effective and more expensive. Like David Auerbach wrote about in Bitwise, the modern technology economy has now become about labeling users. The more labels you can apply, the more ads you can sell.
Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot. You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their product endorsements, whatever.
It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all talking very loudly at each other about random topics.
> Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Absolutely, we need tags, and the ability to make them opt-in or opt-out for followers. So I can file ^food as an opt-in, and people who don't care about that can ignore them and just get the ^programming ones. Right now, followers and friends are all lumped together and so while friends follow you for life updates, followers generally only care about what you can do for them, eg your work. It's draining to try and manage multiple accounts. Some followers may find the side stuff cool, too.
>“More relevance means less time on the service, and that’s perfectly fine,” Dorsey said, adding that Twitter can still serve ads against relevant content.
Dorsey to me has it half right. Twitter should just follow with what we typically do in real life: "follow" people, but masked by interests we trust those people about. I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential impact of our words and actions before hitting "Send". Only if you assume people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to design things so users will act better on their own vs having to be slapped down when they do something terrible.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down.
I think the problem with this approach is that it assumes that typical users like you and me, not bots or people with a particular agenda or goal (i.e. brigading) are the primary sources of abuse.
Unfortunately I think it's much more likely to be the latter section of highly motivated users or bots that are responsible for a disproportion volume of abuse, and there's little incentive Twitter can create to motivate them otherwise
I have found that with social media in general it has never mapped to my interactions in person. I have friends I talk politics with, friends I talk sports with, friends I talk music, and etc. Sometimes they overlap, but almost never in totality. Social media gives me people in total, because I don't think people have really learned how to curate themselves, or really understand how the signal broadcasts. Everyone is learning by trial and error, and I don't think we are learning the right things yet.
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition
Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics.
This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.
Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making 80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could still see and participate in their topics I care about.
This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just don't discuss certain topics with.
I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular topic.
I found the same thing happening to me all the time. I follow software devs, writers, etc. because I am interested in what they do not whatever politics they go on about like everyone else. What I found helped a lot was twitter's mute words functionality, so I just muted words like Trump etc. and it cleaned up my feed a LOT. Much more enjoyable experience now.
I just can't get value out of Twitter, for this very reason. I know you can use any social network for any purpose, but for me, Facebook has always been about following friends and family, and I enjoy the content. Twitter has always been pushed as a way to be "in the know", but no matter how hard I try to 'curate' my feed, I find that following people who I don't personally know means that most of the tweets I see are worse than meaningless, they have negative value. So my entire feed ends up being either ads, or content I don't want to hear about from the people I follow for other reasons.
Interesting that the quoted “hard questions” about failure to remove Nazis is in direct opposition to the criticism Twitter has received on, for example, the second Joe Rogan interview.
When I view what Dorsey is saying through the lens of the Rogan interview, I don’t see a push towards “algorithmic feeds” which you have already, but towards something where the users actually have more control over what they see, not less. But it’s impossible to tell from these short quotes.
What’s fascinating is the ambiguity of goals and responsibilities Twitter has regarding “hate speech” and so forth.
The quotes in the article seem to indicate questions presuming toxic viewpoints need to have their platform removed, the questions in the Rogan interview work from the assumption stifling speech is bad, and Dorsey keeps saying he is concerned about the safety of individual users.
It’s bewildering because I’m not sure anyone really understands what anyone else is even trying to accomplish.
From some comment Tim Pool made afterwards it appears that they got the impression Jack didn't really understand this was a major issue or the depths of dangerous stifling of speech they were participating in by potentially banning people who were just labeled "Nazi" because it's now a synonym for what you call someone you don't like or agree with.
It sounds like he's been looking into the issue and taking some executive action to stop the platform from being controlled by a single ideology group.
I use https://twitterfall.com/ as my main interface for Twitter It just streams downward from the top, no need to refresh. It's not pretty but I like it.
Also, I don't recognize the issues lots of people have with Twitter, because I mostly only see the original tweets and only follow mostly sensible people that post interesting stuff (scientists, AI & robotics folks, tech journalists, some space exploration accounts).
Look - Jack makes money of pushing upsetting content into everybody's feeds. It pushes up the enragement numbers.
Let's be clear here, he's not going to change it. He's going to continue to waffle around and pretend he wants to change, and it's not going to happen.
Can we stop giving air to these excuse publications?
"Interest-based" is basically what Reddit does well. If you're reading the accordion subreddit and some users there are also interested in politics or crypto or whatever, you're not going to see their other stuff. (On the other hand, you also don't learn about their other interests.)
On Twitter, I follow people who post good stuff sometimes, but they also post other stuff that's irrelevant. Worse, I see stuff they "like" which is often inflamatory.
A serious complication is that there are now several autocrats and would be autocrats who use the platform to spew fear mongering, race baiting and unfiltered falsehoods to their public. I imagine Dorsey knows he will face very real retaliation if they perceive he has diminished their reach.
I just want a "Muffle" or "Volume Down" button for accounts. Some people are such prolific tweeters that they take over your feed. For some people, I just want the highlights.
Closed my account long ago in response to the 2016 elections. Not so much to mute the conversation but in protest against giving a voice to a terrible person. My life has been a little better ever since.
Shifting to interest-based feeds entirely misses the problem, and would actually make it worse.
Trusting information isn't only about trusting the source, it's also about whether that piece of information fits into your established frame of reference for how the world works. It also depends on how many different emotional buttons the information presses, fear being the strongest.
Shifting to an interest-based delivery system would only reinforce filter bubbles. And what's the alternative? Forcing people to see things you know they'd disagree with? Somewhere in the middle?
I worry a lot more about the rise of advertorials and product placements replacing traditional advertising, than I do about the visibility or importance of follower counts.
> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.
_You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes".
Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better.
Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" - instead of take a look at whether that's users want.
Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.
I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux.
IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.
Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.
How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.
But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
Maybe you hate the idea of it becoming an interest-based network, and maybe I hate it, and maybe everybody on this site hates it, but we are a very very small speck of a subset of Twitter's active userbase.
Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.
Erm...seriously? You believe that the hardest part of starting a billion dollar company is getting...funding? You think billion dollar companies primarily don't exist because nobody is funding them? It's hard for me to believe that you actually think that.
It's not what I said but it's fairly obvious that money is like steroids. You can't turn a donkey into a race horse but any semi-competent person can be successful with enough cash injection and network to get good advice.
Doesn't this run counter to even conventional wisdom about VC? 25-30% of all VC-backed startups liquidate all assets, and 75% return only the original investment.
That is a consequence of two things. 1) the all or nothing approach to business that VC backed startups take and 2) the lack of quality network for many founders. It's why I specifically mentioned network for good advice. If you look at the patterns emerging from silicon valley with the PayPal mafia and even YC itself there is a clear advantage to be had from A) access to immense amounts of cash coupled with B) a network of people who have been there and done that. I find it very hard to believe that white upper middle class males are remarkable for their genius intellect as successful founder profiles would have you believe if looked at in isolation. From a purely critical perspective there is a wide range of intellect levels on display amongst unicorn founders.
So, again, to be clear, you believe that a person with access to:
A) A "network", i.e. is friends with talented people
And has access to:
B) "Immense amounts of cash". How much cash? 1 million? 10? 100?
Can easily earn a 10x-100x return on that money? You think turning 10 million into 100 million is easy? Do you know how many people are trying to do that? Do you have any idea how difficult that is even with access to a network and cash?
Money is extremely cheap. The biggest problem in silicon valley right now isn't access to capital - it's that there's too much capital chasing too few good ideas. VCs are desperate for something worth investing in, precisely because of how hard it is to create a good company.
> You can't turn a donkey into a race horse but any semi-competent person can be successful with enough cash injection and network to get good advice.
You've obviously never actually started a company. Talk to me when you have. People with money flame out every day. A huge percentage of companies that do receive VC funding fail. Way, way more than half. An infinitesimal fraction of companies VCs invest in go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. An even smaller fraction of those go on to be worth more than 10 billion dollars. Jack Dorsey created two of them. There are only a handful of people on earth who have done that. And when I say a handful, I mean like you can literally count them on your hands.
It's a contributor to funding sure, but that's not what I asked.
The issue is, would a random person off the street be able to take VC seed money and turn it into a billion dollar business? The answer is obviously no. And they definitely wouldn't be able to do it twice.
A random person of the street? No. Somebody who did it once already and has all the experience and contacts? Far more likely. I would say the first time is a lot harder.
But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.
> But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.
How do you know? What evidence do you have of these imaginary other's merit?
I get your point, but seriously, go read Nick Bilton's book about the early history or Twitter. From the time of Odeo to Jack coming back, none of the people in charge of this company or the board had a consistent idea of what they were building, an appropriate roadmap to get there, or how to monetize effectively relative to other social networks. This happened for years.
Square is amazing, but a B2B, modern Point-of-Sales for SMBs is an entirely different beast than a free, B2C social network. Jack can be great at one, and terrible at the other, at the same time. These are not related.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but judging from the fact that Ev Williams founded or co-founded Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, perhaps he was the real visionary behind the idea. That's three different "write stuff online and share it" startups. He clearly understands social media and blogging and micro-blogging. Maybe Jack is more of the 'biz guy'?
My take on the founding of twitter is that you had a bunch of people and no clear leadership, and that different people had different opinions of what twitter should be. That ambiguity has undermined the platform from day one, no focus, no clear mission, no clear plan on how to spend their money.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. The simple fact is the guy created two deca-corn companies. That basically completely invalidates any ex-post arguments by some author about the quality of his management. What I mean by that is that if a thing succeeds spectacularly, maybe you should question your premises before questioning its methodology. The process that appears to you to be disorganized and aimless produced Twitter. It obviously did something right.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 383 ms ] threadYeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.
It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc.
I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating.
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
It was independent then Twitter bought it.
There were alternatives before such as Seesmic, no idea how they work now, if they still do.
I rarely search but isn't that what hashtags solve?
I think changes could be good but history says it will be worse.
Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions?
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.
But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
"twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!"
case closed my circular dude
It's not a very good metric for measuring actual usefulness to users at all though.
We need a business model for social media where incentives for companies and their users actually line up.
"nonprofit" is not code for "zero revenue"
[0]: https://cryptograffiti.info
Min maxed “user engagement” is almost certainly a net negative for society at large
Oh yeah?! Well... YOU'RE an internet argument!
You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.
I use Twitter Web so infrequently that whenever I open it, it has always changed back to the "Top Tweets" view.
If only Twitter had separate URLs for the two styles, then I could just update my bookmark...
I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.
There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
You have just described an algorithm, I believe.
What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless.
Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
Bundle it under "experimental" or "advanced features" in an easy to use page with a very clear explanation of what each feature does.
I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com
Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
Twitter very likely did market research on its effectiveness for the target market they were trying to please. Probably that's just not you.
I like HN. But I never look at particular users' posts. I just look at the front page, or sometimes at the comments list, so see what people are talking about.
I think for it to work people would have to start blocking more and using more mute words.
The thing where someone retweets something horrible because they disagree with it is so wrong and is what is being badly gamed.
It's funny. For all that I support free speech, I don't have the patience to read much of it. So I end up gravitating to well moderated forums.
I want to turn them off completely.
I've taken to just unfollowing the users who they force notifications from.
Even though sometimes I'm generally interested in the user's content, I'll view it when I feel like it, not when Twitter wants me to.
Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.
You know. Assholes.
Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.
The same reason you do anything - they’ll take their business elsewhere unless you provide service and support in the way they want it.
People don’t like being told to go away and follow some other procedure when they have a problem.
Might as well tell them they should avoid having any problems requiring support while you’re at it - that’ll make it even easier for you.
If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.
The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.
And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.
Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?
And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?
Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.
If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.
Note that the poster said "an official support channel" rather than "the official support channel". Adding more ways for customers to contact support is usually a good thing. There was no mention of taking away other channels that you might prefer.
If they ever fully disable 3rd party clients that will be the day I cancel my account. I thought forced ads as you started a DVD were obnoxious...
"Fully disable" - probably not. But they'll certainly make it nearly impossible to produce something "like the Twitter app but better".
My approach is now to unfollow any user when Twitter forces a notification from them. Maybe someone with some brains at Twitter will notice the clear pattern and fix their idiotic notifications.
I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
My interests are @thisdude and @thatchick. That's why it's called "social."
> And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising.
I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
I don't follow too many people so it just fills up my timeline with a little more stuff, otherwise it would be rather stale.
Judging by the amount of alt-right nonsense that gets promoted to me despite my complete disinterest I'd say they're fucking delighted.
It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.
For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
Well now you know why you're seeing what you're seeing.
Are programmers supposed to be some apolitical hyper-rational cohort?
Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality".
Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
It generalizes.
I suppose that, as demographics change and new Asian cultures start to dominate the market, that will change. But by now it is the way it is.
In my experience, people who assume that eventually progress to assuming that those are actually one and the same.
I'd say "liberal" is a more accurate descriptor than "left-leaning". I'd call PewDiePie liberal but not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, for example.
When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it.
If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
Bizarre interpretation.
Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
That said, I like following people because one of my interests is people.
This is probably true for the majority of Twitter's users, but this is completely the opposite of what I want. Even with aggressively pruning the list of people I follow, I still feel the need to maintain topical lists with few people on them. (One of them is literally called "interesting" - it's for people who don't post often, but whose tweets I'm very interested in seeing, in chronological order, and don't want to lose in the shuffle and retweets and random shit twitter tries to inject into my stream.)
I want to curate my own content.
Wasn't the attraction that you could follow someone who matched your interests, like "antique model steam engine refurbishment", or whatever niche interest an individual might have? If twitter had a vetted list of large creators, they'd be right back in the "all of this network content is lowest-common-denominator dreck" situation that ABC/CBS/NBC were in circa 1985. Which may not be a bad thing for society as a whole (we can have an agreed-upon set of facts again! No alternate facts!), but why did we go through 30 years of media upheavals and the loss of the good things about newspapers and TV (equal time doctrine) to get back there? Was this all just about creating a different set of media moguls?
If you are single mindedly contented with some obscure niche you have so many wonderful options today because nothing is easier to advertise to than groups with really specific interests that require buying things.
What's lacking is well rounded, pleasant experiences. I'm not a collection of discrete interests and I definitely don't want to become one nor am I interested in meeting one.
Except they made a mistake, and one person slipped through the net, and was completely miserable and driven insane by this.
To answer your actual question, I bet most social networks would be perfectly fine with just being mass market gatekeepers. It's expensive to have 100,000 newspapers and TV networks to appear customized enough for everyone watching; but it's cheap to have 100,000 versions of Facebook's wall, or Reddit's front page.
Seems like this can definitely be done with a combination of a reputation system and post stats like acceleration/momentum.
The solution here is to go places they normally advertise and astro-turf groups that "object" to whatever they are already advertised near.
They will have to learn that no matter what you do, somebody will be upset.
This concisely expresses many of my misgivings with the Internet today. Things have been dumbed down and often cater to the lowest common denominator that people share. Evolutionarily speaking, it's chasing after low-hanging fruit (cheap and easy) and then hyper-optimizing for it to the point that it's all that remains. The problem is that it's sterile and dumbed down.
I don't like that we can't customize things or get out of the sandbox anymore now that everything has been siloed. With email and RSS we could construct filters and programmatically access our data. We could change the interface, query, backup, share.
The platform powers that be are dictating how today's internet works. They're taking away our browser tech (Chrome everywhere, increasingly without add-ons). We can't export our data in meaningful formats.
This is the hell future 1990's Microsoft could only dream of.
For whatever reason, Jack feels like he needs this to make Twitter more money and is trying to sell it as a benefit for active users. But it's really pissing on the active userbase and claiming that it's raining.
This is an attempt to keep that dynamic from forming in the first place.
Or possibly worse, we don't realize that it's exactly what the government wants.
Yes, I realize they are tricky to implement and subject to abuse but imagine you got points for using your real name, real photo, demerits for insults etc, then users could filter out hordes of trolls and gutter nonsense and instead focus on the meaningful conversations that do actually occur there -- the verified checkmark is a proto-version of this.
Instead they rely solely on blacklisting, which is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Even HN has a more sophisticated system, where users can be shadow banned or have their comments appear lower than normal.
Not sure how useful this macro-scale philosophizing by Dorsey on Twitter itself is for delivering new, useful features to users. Serious question: has Twitter released any new, major features in the last 2-3 years?
I'd like to see them try other things too. One of the nice features in G+ was that the owner of a thread (the originator) could delete replies. I think that could work nicely in Twitter too.
Interesting; I think adding this feature without changing anything else would severely exacerbate the already intolerable echo-chamber effect. Sure, trolling and abuse would lose visibility, but so would even slightly contrary opinions. Thought bubbles would shrink even further, and the platform would become even less enjoyable. (Context: I'm a light Twitter user, reading ~10 min/day and sending 1-2 tweets/month)
Take Maggie Haberman, NYT reporter. Her Twitter replies are always a cesspool...what if she could lock down her tweets so only a whitelisted group of users (say people she follows) could comment? You'd still (hopefully) get contrary opinions but none of the dreck that dominates her feed now.
I don't know if that's the answer. But I don't see Twitter even trying, just Dorsey waxing philosophical about it.
If it's her thread, she should be able to curate it in anyway she wants.
Not having a real name on Twitter isn't even a good heuristic for anything.
But my point is not real photos/names as the be-all, end-all. How about many heuristics, and let users filter accordingly? All this data available and none of it is used to improve the user experience, at least as far as I can tell.
HN has such low volume that it can be centrally curated by a few people who enforce policies like "no flame bait -- and I'll know it when I see it." Or, for example, when someone writes a quick attack on HN, they are encouraged to flesh out their point with substance which is something that Twitter fundamentally discourages.
It's hard for me to see any way forward for Twitter. By design, it amplifies the worst characteristics of humans from tribalism to outrage fetishism.
For instance, even if you configured Twitter to never see posts from the opposing cultural faction or trolls (usually used as synonyms), the people you follow will retweet/quote them and bring them back into your feed.
If you have troll engagers in your feed, unfollow them. But right now I have no way of filtering replies...it's frustrating. No system is perfect but let's at least TRY to improve the status quo.
If Twitter is consistently beta-testing new features to improve the quality of the UX/tweet replies, I personally am not seeing it.
It's like how you can /ignore someone on IRC and phpbb, but nobody actually does. They only threaten it. Hell yes they want to be clued in when you open your mouth so they can bark back! Humans love it.
Look how many people waste their time responding to Donald Trump's tweets with things like "RESIGN!" They could unfollow Trump. But they choose to spend their precious time on earth bickering about Trump because it's pure entertainment.
What also happens though is that we kinda know this. The more astute/introspective people will realize Twitter isn't bringing out the best in us. Sam Harris lamented this a while back and was able to quit Twitter for a couple days before being driven back to the crack.
I find myself doing this on HN too. Ever read a headline like "Javascript sucks", know the arguments you'll find in the HN comments, and click in to respond to one? The whole reason I'm here is to socialize, so I don't think filtering can be very effective. I'm not going to filter out the very things that draw me like the opportunity to call someone out on the internet, which is the same reason why nobody uses the ignore feature on forums.
Nobody would use the block feature on Twitter if it didn't tell the other person you blocked them.
There are some bugs in basic human psychology that I'm not so sure technology is ready to solve. Maybe this is the Great Filter that no civilization can surpass in the Fermi paradox.
Well, there is a "mute" feature which acts a lot like a "silent" block, and plenty of people use that.
The real problem is that reputation can't be absolute but is relative to a context. Hence the blockbot partial solution.
If some people want more interesting opinions, great. If others want more bland but less abuse, also great. Right now you can't filter for anything and most of tweet replies are a giant waste of time.
Becuase you might not like - or they might not want you to see things that are popular.
How much would you complain if your Twitter feed was filled with Trump tweets? Better yet, how much would they not like that!? - Sorry though it's based on reputation levels and his is up there relative to non-famous users.
Double-length tweets is the most major thing that comes to mind for me.
I guess what I mean is: what innovative features have they introduced?
But I'm not sure they know Slashdot
>Instead they rely solely on blacklisting
twitter has implemented very heavy handed throttling as well in order limit the reach of users deemed unsavory. whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate. in some sense i wonder if these networks have simply become too generalized to be moderated effectively in a manner that satisfies all of the different facets of the userbase.
> “We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”
And they’ve been bugging me so much to sign in I feel like I can’t give in if I’ve come this far.
...is a shortcut for activating the following filters: filter:follows -filter:replies
However, to your point, it still requires you to be signed in to work.
So reddit.
If you stick to smaller, interested based subs, reddit is a far superior product because it has human moderators and threading. The "breaking news" aspect of Twitter is extremely oversold imo, but people post things just as quickly on reddit.
Between the censorship on /news and /worldnews who argue "no US politics... unless it's an anti-Trump circlejerk", the straight up lunatics on /politics. The unfunny on /funny. The boobs on /gaming... which I'm not actually complaining about. Everything photoshopped to hell on /pics. Unbashed propoganda on /science. Gullible fools on /futurology. /television /movies /music falling for every PR created "news" put out... No Thank You.
/ECE /ReverseEngineering /gundeals /programming are OK though.
TV news and online news sites usually lag behind and rarely fact-check the "breaking news" so they're generally only worth paying attention days or weeks later when all the fact checking is done. If they're up to date, they're mostly recycling other people's content from social media without attributing any sources or real fact checking. If they're not recycling social media they're generally so vague and non-committal that they basically tell you nothing.
When the Notre Dame fire broke out the only thing I saw on TV was a short matter-of-fact notice in the evening news. Social media had live streams and people linking to articles about the renovations etc.
It'll be interesting to see how Jack Dorsey reacts to that.
Edit: if anyone happening to read this works for Twitter or has the capability to pass a message to @jack, here's a free idea for a pivot to your business model:
Offer hosted ActivityPub federation utilizing your existing Twitter platform. In other words, become the "Google Apps for Your Domain/G Suite" for hosted ActivityPub instances. Media organizations, governments, and celebs should be paying a premium for the content hosting you provide today for free.
https://www.w3.org/standards/faq#std
https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785
Christ, the self-importance of the Twitterverse is astonishing. What they don't say out loud is that Trump and Brexiteers and others they oppose have used the platform to effectively end-run the media, they hate that, but they can't figure out a way to stop them. A little bit of plain speaking would be refreshing.
In my experience, there are primarily three kinds of people that regularly claim there's a lot on the line, and it doesn't matter what their political views are. 1) young people that are inexperienced, 2) people that need to feel good about fighting for something important, and 3) people that exploit the other two by appealing to that. It's a good tactic to motivate your base, but like crying wolf, it loses it's effectiveness when done too often.
More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century, making predictions of that correct. Obviously neither life nor the universe have ended as many times in that period.
Furthermore, I know of no well informed people that have ever predicted the later but many who have successfully predicted the former.
Edit: It also begs the question of whether democracy is the best form of government for every country, but I leave that aside, since I'm not sure we've reached agreement on whether Twitter is really that important or influential in the lives of governments and societies.
Is "the party I prefer has lost the election" the same as "a democracy has fallen"? Because I really don't see a dozen democracies that left democracy behind, and certainly not many times that. I suppose it depends on your definition of democracy, but for anything close to the common understanding of a modern liberal democracy, that just sounds ridiculous.
We need to stop useful community content from getting black holed into walled gardens of Eternal September.
If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news website already.
It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in vaguely similar stuff that people in other rooms are saying, and then sorts all messages in order of whoever is the most popular or says the most relevant keywords.
Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot. You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their product endorsements, whatever.
It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all talking very loudly at each other about random topics.
Absolutely, we need tags, and the ability to make them opt-in or opt-out for followers. So I can file ^food as an opt-in, and people who don't care about that can ignore them and just get the ^programming ones. Right now, followers and friends are all lumped together and so while friends follow you for life updates, followers generally only care about what you can do for them, eg your work. It's draining to try and manage multiple accounts. Some followers may find the side stuff cool, too.
What do shareholders think of this?
Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential impact of our words and actions before hitting "Send". Only if you assume people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to design things so users will act better on their own vs having to be slapped down when they do something terrible.
I think the problem with this approach is that it assumes that typical users like you and me, not bots or people with a particular agenda or goal (i.e. brigading) are the primary sources of abuse.
Unfortunately I think it's much more likely to be the latter section of highly motivated users or bots that are responsible for a disproportion volume of abuse, and there's little incentive Twitter can create to motivate them otherwise
Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets
This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.
Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making 80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could still see and participate in their topics I care about.
This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just don't discuss certain topics with.
I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular topic.
When I view what Dorsey is saying through the lens of the Rogan interview, I don’t see a push towards “algorithmic feeds” which you have already, but towards something where the users actually have more control over what they see, not less. But it’s impossible to tell from these short quotes.
What’s fascinating is the ambiguity of goals and responsibilities Twitter has regarding “hate speech” and so forth.
The quotes in the article seem to indicate questions presuming toxic viewpoints need to have their platform removed, the questions in the Rogan interview work from the assumption stifling speech is bad, and Dorsey keeps saying he is concerned about the safety of individual users.
It’s bewildering because I’m not sure anyone really understands what anyone else is even trying to accomplish.
It sounds like he's been looking into the issue and taking some executive action to stop the platform from being controlled by a single ideology group.
Also, I don't recognize the issues lots of people have with Twitter, because I mostly only see the original tweets and only follow mostly sensible people that post interesting stuff (scientists, AI & robotics folks, tech journalists, some space exploration accounts).
Let's be clear here, he's not going to change it. He's going to continue to waffle around and pretend he wants to change, and it's not going to happen.
Can we stop giving air to these excuse publications?
On Twitter, I follow people who post good stuff sometimes, but they also post other stuff that's irrelevant. Worse, I see stuff they "like" which is often inflamatory.
I want to follow science person’s science tweets and hide science person’s politics tweets.
You can force people to tag their tweets by letting us only follow their tags.
Science person’s profile can show top followed tags of Science person.
#science followed by 100
#politics followed by 5
Trusting information isn't only about trusting the source, it's also about whether that piece of information fits into your established frame of reference for how the world works. It also depends on how many different emotional buttons the information presses, fear being the strongest.
Shifting to an interest-based delivery system would only reinforce filter bubbles. And what's the alternative? Forcing people to see things you know they'd disagree with? Somewhere in the middle?
I worry a lot more about the rise of advertorials and product placements replacing traditional advertising, than I do about the visibility or importance of follower counts.
_You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes".
Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better.
Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" - instead of take a look at whether that's users want.
Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.
IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.
Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.
How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.
But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/report-3-out-of-4-venture...
A) A "network", i.e. is friends with talented people
And has access to:
B) "Immense amounts of cash". How much cash? 1 million? 10? 100?
Can easily earn a 10x-100x return on that money? You think turning 10 million into 100 million is easy? Do you know how many people are trying to do that? Do you have any idea how difficult that is even with access to a network and cash?
Money is extremely cheap. The biggest problem in silicon valley right now isn't access to capital - it's that there's too much capital chasing too few good ideas. VCs are desperate for something worth investing in, precisely because of how hard it is to create a good company.
You've obviously never actually started a company. Talk to me when you have. People with money flame out every day. A huge percentage of companies that do receive VC funding fail. Way, way more than half. An infinitesimal fraction of companies VCs invest in go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. An even smaller fraction of those go on to be worth more than 10 billion dollars. Jack Dorsey created two of them. There are only a handful of people on earth who have done that. And when I say a handful, I mean like you can literally count them on your hands.
There is an alternative explanation https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/speechless-mel...
The issue is, would a random person off the street be able to take VC seed money and turn it into a billion dollar business? The answer is obviously no. And they definitely wouldn't be able to do it twice.
But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.
How do you know? What evidence do you have of these imaginary other's merit?
You realize Square is a thriving, $31B public company at the time of this comment?
Starting a company is one thing. Creating the phenomenon that is Square is quite another.
Square is amazing, but a B2B, modern Point-of-Sales for SMBs is an entirely different beast than a free, B2C social network. Jack can be great at one, and terrible at the other, at the same time. These are not related.
My take on the founding of twitter is that you had a bunch of people and no clear leadership, and that different people had different opinions of what twitter should be. That ambiguity has undermined the platform from day one, no focus, no clear mission, no clear plan on how to spend their money.
Sorry? Twitter is worth $25 billion.
How did it go wrong?
Even if you want to talk about morals on a philosophical level, that's not what A/B testing is.
A better way to express this is that if what you're trying to OPTIMIZE is wrong you're going to make an optimally poor product.
They're starting with really poor initial assumptions that things like more pageviews is always a good thing