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Rewrite Twitter to Improve Discourse

10 points by caminmccluskey ↗ HN
The general sentiment of discourse on Twitter seems to be at an all time low. It's an actively depressing place to spend any amount of time browsing. My question is, if Twitter could rewrite overnight, what fundamental changes should they make to the platform to make it a more pleasant place to exchange thoughts and ideas? Furthermore, what changes could be made to make the platform more open to civilised debate across a range of (potentially sensitive) topics?

I realise that hate is good for engagement, ideally any changes they made wouldn't affect this (else they wouldn't make them). I also realise that the average level of "pleasant" isn't a metric you can directly measure - so we could assume average positive sentiment per tweet.

On the second question let's assume you can measure ad hominem (somewhat possible: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-2028.pdf) and changes which minimise this are desirable.

21 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 38.3 ms ] thread
thekashifmalik
Removing replies would be one way to differentiate themselves further from something like a facebook post.

Maybe also retweets without added context.

caminmccluskey
Just to clarify - don't allow retweets with a reply? I like this idea to get around the sort of "dunk tweet" culture (assuming I'm understanding your point correctly)
caminmccluskey
Some questions I had - which might spurn ideas. Obviously some may have undesirable side effects, some are technically challenging etc.

Q: if emojis didnt count towards character count, would the discourse on twitter be any better? Q: What if tweets has a minimum character count, instead of a maximum? Q: What if you could just detect Ad Hominem - https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-2028.pdf Q: What if Twitter had moderators? Q: What if you had a reputation on Twitter - and your reputation determined your reach? Q: What if you subscribed to topics and ideas - not to people? Q: What if Twitter fact checked every post? Q: What if there is no concept likes? OR what if there were downvotes as well as up? Q: What if it were easier to mark something as harmful? Q: What if the community was always kept small?

valand
> OR what if there were downvotes as well as up?

Downvotes can be abused for undermining people's thought you disagree on.

Instead, provide a way to "counter-argument", which if upvoted, will count as downvote to the parent argument.

This will enable people to "rob" votes of swing voters from the parent argument to the counter-argument

Also, hint: you might want to separate those questions above d with double line endings

joshribakoff
Up and down votes with a karma system
caminmccluskey
I really like the Karma system. I think Karma as a way to decide user permissions is interesting (as is the case on hacker news). I also wonder if karma should decide the “reach” of a tweet, that way more respected users get to amplify their ideas and trolls do not. Downvotes is a contentious one, as we want to foster active debate. The issue I see with downvotes is that their ambiguous - you might downvote because you disagree with the statement OR because you don’t like the tweet.
suyula
Add a captcha per post/retweet.

This would trash all the engagement metrics, but I feel like making bots do more work and making humans think twice about their actions on the site would make the platform better overall.

caminmccluskey
I had been thinking about a sort of human prompt, like a time window to take back a tweet with a prompt to consider if it’s kind/necessary. Won’t do anything about bots, since I imagine it would just be a tick box or something, or no action means you’re happy for the tweet to send
alexmingoia
Is it Twitter or who you choose to follow?
caminmccluskey
This is a good question - I found recently that I was following more political accounts and maybe if I used it just to keep up with my industry/hobbies I might have a nicer experience. Does anyone find twitter is a pleasant/supportive place though? (Genuine question)
caminmccluskey
Although with that said, I don’t notice political views seem to enter most discussion regardless of topic
tmaly
If you do not need global reach, private forums are great for discourse. Everyone one a private forum is there for a reason. The theme/topic of the forum is very focused.

For example, I belong to a karaoke forum. I used it to learn how to build my own karaoke system.

slightwinder
You can't fix social problems with technical solutions.

Twitter is by design a melting pot of opinions because of it's global access to anything, which is good and bad in it's own ways. Until this design changes, there is not much you can improve on fundamental levels. And any fundamental change would mean for twitter to stop being twitter. Then you could also just switch to your personal forum, blog, discord or whatever controlled safespace you prefer for your content.

Thouhg, this was with twitter always the case, it's nothing really new. Maybe it's your perception which changed, or your bubble which has moved? Maybe you are at the point of being "to old for this shit" now?

caminmccluskey
Thanks for your thoughts, Twitter is a melting pot, and that's a fantastic thing. I would probably agree that fundamental social problems can't be "fixed" by technical solutions. However Twitter (in particular) seems to exacerbate out of group bias
slightwinder
It's not Twitter in particular. The same happens on reddit, facebook, youtube and any other place where enough peoplle gather to voice their opinions. Before twitter the same happend in usenet and smaller webforums. After twitter the same will happen in whatever global space will be envogue then.

The only real way to fix it is to not give people any space at all, otherwise hate will always find it's way. Anything else is just patching details and managing tradeoffs between advantages and disadvantages.

manx
Try to avoid the positive feedback loops in the system. Everything gets distorted by that.

Retweets get more views and in turn more retweets. And so on. Everyone tries to game this system to harvest these feedback loops. HN, Reddit, Facebook all have the same problem.

I'm preparing a blog article about this topic with an analysis and some solution approaches.

If you're interested, please contact me, I'm happy to discuss this very important topic.

auganov
The way it works right now, a ton of random people can write nasty defamatory things about you and before the reporting system kicks in you can't really do much. And even then they won't take most stuff down. For example most profane insults are perfectly fine to Twitter.

Blocking doesn't help much as it only blocks future replies from a given person.

You'd probably want to try solving this problem without being too censorious.

90% of accounts I've been harassed by looked like they've been made exclusively for that purpose so I imagine just being tougher on fake accounts would solve most of the problem.

Twitter is a niche social network with poor growth and a strong political slant so not buying the argument that it's so great for engagement. It just has a lot of mindshare in some circles. Could easily double the userbase.