$3 for color themes and a reader mode? I don't like how it creates negative incentives to make regular twitter readable. I often see poeple here already complaining that threads are hard to read, and this could make it worse.
Edit: also quick undo. So they are monetizing the lack of basic features and their restrictions on clients. I don't really like the idea.
That and an option to permanently opt out of their curation of my timeline. I just want to see the content of people I actually follow in a chronological fashion.
At the moment I‘am quiet happy using Tweetbot but most 3rd party clients are hampered due to API restrictions on Twitters side.
I also use Tweetbot, and am experiencing very little of what everybody else is complaining about. I see only my timeline, and I use lists to make sure I don't miss anything from certain people I follow.
Tweetbot has had mute longer than Twitter has, and some, um, acquaintances I follow I've had muted for years. And I mute keywords if something is getting way too much play, like the electric F-150.
Will I pay Twitter $3/month? Sure, since I'd like to pay for what I use, just like I subscribe to the latest Tweetbot client. Will I use the Twitter client to get the benefits of Twitter Blue? Probably not.
Twitter threads must die, they are an oxymoron and a fugly hack. Just bloody give people a "gist.twitter.io" for long form, or something like that, for goodness' sake.
The "point" or benefit of a twitter thread as opposed to straightforward longform is that each tweet (sentence or paragraph) can stand alone (in terms of liked and retweet circulation) as well as being a part of a broader piece.
"Can" or rather "could", but never really does in practice. Take away the thread, and 99.99% of mid-thread tweets lose all meaning. It just makes things awkward for the sake of it.
It's funny, I mean, you're not wrong, but there was a period when I wrote a lot of twitter threads, and I enjoyed the challenge of making each tweet stand alone. I think it made me a better writer. But yes, many don't take advantage of this.
Some people here will probably remember twitlonger, which wasn't that great. That or posting screenshots of text. I think threads, the idea, are fine; but the implementation is not good. I don't understand why, when you load a tweet in a thread that's not too long (< 50 tweets), Twitter refuses to just show the whole threads and makes you click "show more" every 5 tweets. That's a really bad UX.
This is just the beginning. They could add more features right? Similar to how Amazon Prime began as free 2-day shipping and then added Prime Video and what not.
Free 2 day shipping had still enormous value to many. Further additions to value also indirectly resulted in prices increasing over time.
I can't think of a reason why any one is going to pay for this ? If they at least marked users as "Blue" like verified perhaps the social status would drive sales, right now there doesn't seem to be any incentive all.
"Twitter Blue" is already a stupid name, after "YouTube Red" (which is stupid for the same reasons. At least YouTube tried it first, I guess) but it gets worse when the only feature I can see in that post is that you can select colours, other than the Twitter blue, making effectively not blue. At least YouTube Red keeps the colour (I guess, I have no idea)
Sounds like the product team had difficulty coming up with a name. You probably don't want to name it Twitter Premium if there's nothing exactly premium there except for an undo button and color choices, and Premium or Enhanced imply that their base product isn't sufficient. If you remove Twitter <adjective> from the consideration, really all you can do is come up with a name that's somewhat disjointed but related to the product.
I was thinking of Twitter as a social/comment/news webapp company using the word "plus" to market a new product in a space where a cash-rich competitor with a decade-old product with broadly similar functionality already uses the word "plus" as the entire name of their own entry in the category.
An analog might be game publisher King (maker of Candy Crush Saga) initiating legal proceedings against makers of other games that used the word "Saga" or "Candy", e.g. "Banner Saga"[1], even though those are obviously not reasonable claims -- and I think they lost? Regardless, they're still able to try, and it exerted pressure.
So, imagine you're sitting in a board room at Twitter, naming your new social web app product, and someone says, "How about 'Twitter+'?", and you know there's Disney+, and Apple TV+, and Google+ all already out there, and you say, "nah... that sounds like a headache we can do without." But maybe not, hence why I noted I was merely wondering.
Such naming is part of my break-up plan for the tech giants. If you break Facebook up into three successor companies with competing networks, you run into the problem of what do with the Facebook brand. It would be unfair and counterproductive to give one the brand and have the other two create new ones, so my idea is to give them color versions (e.g. Facebook Red, Facebook Green, Facebook Purple). Eventually they'd probably rebrand, but it's the best solution I can think of to start.
I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now.
What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society.
You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
Gladiators were almost all of them slaves, but they were also entertainers who were expensive to train and keep, and often individually famous, much like WWE wrestlers.
So it was rare that they would be made to fight to the death.
Now, slaughtering prisoners in the arena happened just like you are imagining.
I don't disagree with the assessment, but I think it might be orthogonal to the issue. I think it's very hard to monetize engagement, period, even if it's all positive, constructive, and intellectual engagement.
If your service's business strategy is "1) acquire hundreds of millions of users and charge them all $0.00 per year for many years, 2) acquire lots of expensive infrastructure and employees to support the service, 3) ???, 4) profit", it's not going to be easy.
StackOverflow should be cheap to operate and the value comes almost exclusively from the community. So I don't see any good reason why StackOverflow would need to earn much revenue. Probably an annual fundraiser like what Wikipedia does would be more than sufficient to cover the operating expenses.
The StackOverflow thing is a bit weird, because what the owners have and consider valuable is "a place where people feel comfortable coming and asking questions", but what the core community values is "high-quality curated content", and they're very willing to do aggressive gatekeeping, thus conflicting with value 1, to preserve value 2.
High-quality curated content has been SO's goal since day one. The question/answer format is a means to this end. That's why it has come that most people can easily find a solution to their problem. https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376
>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood
Yeah, this is the kicker. I think SO's primary intended audience is people clicking Google search results.
If I'm Googling something technical and I see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange results, I always click those first, because I know I'm almost always going to attain the most helpful-information-per-unit-time that way. Even if an answer's many years old, it's usually going to be more helpful than most of the much more recent links, which are often just cookie cutter blogspam.
>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood
But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.
I was following StackOverflow back when it was being planned on a podcast. "High-quality curated content" was very much the original mission. This was the driving factor behind the wiki-like interface. In fact, if anything, I'd argue that the problem is that this didn't take off as much as was hoped.
Yeah but now StackOverflow we pay for it in my company. Their value is in the whole info sharing model of the tool, the public one becomes more useless as you grow and the private one is invaluable to ask crazy questions about ultra specific internal idiocy people lost the source code of.
I only go to the public one a few times a day now, compared to being wired to it as a beginner :D
If you're operating at that scale, I think "become a full-on advertising and ad tech company, platform, service, and network from top to bottom" seems like the only viable "step 3" (as with Google and Facebook).
I don't think just selling ads is sufficient; especially if it's not a service you can operate at a relatively low cost with a skeleton crew. I think it's probably either that or start charging for something. (Unless your goal isn't to ever make a profit, I suppose.)
Discord seemed to make it work (I think?) by combining an initial semi-skeleton crew approach with a freemium charging approach. They tried a few other things, but I think those efforts flopped.
> Forbes estimated 1 million people are using Nitro as of 2020, and they made $130 million in revenue in 2020. If you assume that's all the $10/month Nitro (not the cheaper Nitro Classic), then 1 million users paying for Nitro would only account for a pretty small percentage of that. If the Nitro users estimate is accurate, not sure where the rest comes from.
Twitter ads have not returned strong ROI for us (direct response for politics). And dubious for persuasion (more similar to traditional commercial brand ads) though I don't have much hard survey evidence just comparative engagement stats.
I don't know if it's primarily the format, or the different type of user compared to FB, but FB is the winner hands down.
I don't have any problem with Twitter adding a paid option. I've never even used Twitter nor will I ever so it so anything they do to the platform doesn't affect me. It just seems weird that people are making the claim that you can't monitize a large unpaid user-base.
You can, but you basically have to masquerade your company as a user-facing service while behind the scenes it's almost entirely just an ad and ad tech platform.
I think it's plausible Jack Dorsey maybe genuinely just didn't want to sign that deal with the devil. I know I wouldn't want to if I made Twitter. (I have no idea if that's what happened, of course. Maybe he wanted to but couldn't find a good way to achieve it.)
That's not how it really works in practice though because you follow humans who are multi-faceted instead of (human, topic). It is hard to be someone in the public eye and stay out of Twitter drama without turning your account into a RSS feed where you don't engage at all with your followers.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't use Twitter. They'd promote garbage onto my feed all the time. I had to constantly mark tweets as "not relevant." My feed very rarely consisted of tweets from the people I followed. It was mostly outrage/political/meme tweets from "my network" that had a lot of engagement.
I deleted my Twitter last year and I don't miss it.
That is the new "home" they rolled out like two years ago. There is still a setting which lets you only have a predictable and managed feed, and assuming you block ads you have a decent experience with only tweets or retweets from people you follow.
in the top right of the timeline there's a button whose icon looks like a few sparkles. Hit that and switch your feed from "Home" to "Latest Tweets" and you'll only ever see tweets form people you follow, listed chronologically.
What's so strange is that I don't even recognise this description of twitter, and I've been using it for many years. My feed is almost entirely tweets from people I follow, with the occasional ad. I don't even understand what you mean by "network" as distinct from the people you follow. Can I ask, if you can recall, how many people you followed? It's possible that there's a minimum threshold to avoid noise.
I'm following 700 and it's generally a positive experience. I think, as other have pointed out, it could be the 'hot'/latest switch which, I fully agree, is an issue.
Not really true. Twitter will pester you with things it thinks will "engage" you, and it can be quite hard to resist. It has a way to push you further than you would go if left to your own devices.
I'd pay for HN to be honest. But just talking about society on the internet isn't really worth while to me. More people should focus on themselves.
I've long accepted no one cares about how I live my life. A friend of mine spends a ton of their good energy getting upset over the latest 'take' some influencer has. It's like getting upset over an episode of WWE Raw. In any case very very little of what other people do or believe has any direct affect on you.
You wouldn't pay to use Twitter in its current form with its low-brow unmoderated discourse (and neither would I), but would you consider paying for an "improved" version of Twitter? Not saying Twitter Blue is that, but perhaps the promise of getting a Better Twitter can you give you pause for thought and a reach for your wallet?
The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.
I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies were filled with obvious disinformation, flat out lies, and irrelevant accusations.
I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
>But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing.
I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly.
Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong.
My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms.
Yup. I think, as others like Chris Hedges have noted, individuals in Western society have become increasingly atomized and isolated, likely by design to sell more products and keep people feeling powerless/helpless: we're so close (in physical and online proximity), but so far (ideologically, wisdom, knowledge, and experience).
Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness.
The book The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew comes to mind.
> Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness.
I wonder if that's ever happened in the history of humanity. I have my doubts.
I also wonder, but perhaps some of these may approximate more "utopianish" collective community integration:
- Genuine hippie communes (Do kibbutzes count?)
- Amish
- Indigenous tribes where elders are respected
- Rural/suburban Minnesotans because they tend towards hardy dealing with life and climate struggles and unimpressed by immodesty
- In the old days (80's/90's), my grandparents knew most of their neighbors, grocery store cashiers, butcher, hair stylist, and a number of other people well. What ever happened to that? I don't even know any of the neighbors in my apartment complex despite introducing myself, and one (Louis Vuitton-strutting cliché) woman neighbor next door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries in passing. WTH.
Yet there are many differences between the folk spreading information online and the folks you encounter in the pub: the former will often posture themselves as an authority, while the latter you may know well enough to trust or distrust their authority on a particular topic. When people seek authority online, they are typically seeking someone who they agree with. While authority may be found in a pub, it is not really a place where one seeks it.
All of this makes educating people in venues like Twitter (and some of these exist outside of the online world) a very difficult prospect.
Twitter (and nearly every "social" media platform) is like democracy: a sewer hose of manufactured consent, ignorance, mob stupidity, disinformation, and bot-automated propaganda that you'll need more than a shower or 3 to rinse-off.
I gave up and blew up all of my "social" media because they didn't serve any purpose.
Maybe an invite-only platform could have higher signal with:
- multiple "vouches" of others to get an invitation
- frequency/reputation micropayment cost to post
- reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased, and granted some with the invite
- elimination of pile-on
- multifaceted voting based on specific aspects of relevance, agreement, and insight
- humor voted/tagged and filtered by readers to avoid using dv for that
- dv has moderator-visible reasoning to double-check and prevent spurious dv
- prevention of dv retribution
- reduced anonymity (first name and picture) for higher-quality interactions
- mediation and de-escalation facilities such as pre-comment emotional content scanning (AI-based sarcasm detection would rock), posting delay of 2 hours, and side chats
- login required to view content, no search engine spidering
- operate as a sustainable nonprofit to avoid pressures of corporate profiteering
- servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
I guess the issue is keeping moderation consistent (like bar exam grading) coupled with a manageable size of community that handles scaling. I wonder if social media platforms could cluster 10-25 people together into "troops" with a "troop leader" and a "guidance counselor." This way, it's not just a sea of individuals floating along ephemerally disconnected, but brings some tribal belonging and support back that people yearn for.
Yes, I was there. :) 23 years ago ;) I meant some sort of mechanism to improve the training/fairness/consistency of moderators rather than merely double-checking them.
Slashdot died from the incoming content, not the posts, as far as I recall from those days. Digg suffered the same fate. Reddit has so far been kept from it since moderators can only pin a few posts and only have "negative" control of the posts that appear at the top.
Their metamoderation was innovative but ultimately pointless.
Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
That's true. If a community platform's moderation were more professional like the example I used of bar exam graders, who grade practice samples and do other calibration exercises, it would improve the signal and tend to reduce biases if the culture were one of strict professionalism.
I've since come to believe that to have a high quality medium, you really need not just the editorial guidelines I've mentioned, but also someone who interprets those guidelines in the intended way, and the ability to enforce them properly.
That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size.
When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me.
Curated content wins.
Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.
HN has basically one moderator. It's just that we've trained an army of downvoters and flaggers that mostly clobber anything "un-HN" almost immediately. There's a community here and it defends itself.
I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence.
The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that.
We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.
Most subject-specific forums are actually ok. Because posting there demonstrates that you have something worthwhile to care about. Of course one can troll and flamebait on such forums as well but it takes effort and it's not going to seriously rile people up about anything. Twitter is poles apart from that, it's like being in a different universe.
Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK).
On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness.
Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.
HN has decently big scale. Somehow it works because of heavy handed moderation, manual, crowdsourced and automated.
I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.
HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility.
Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts.
There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this).
HN is not social media. Social media has friends/followers, chats, inboxes, timelines... stuff like that. Social media involves some insularity. This is how so-called fake news spreads, because insular networks do not get outside feedback. .
If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
Oh my heavens no. There are certain topics that even this site can't discuss in good faith without groupthink, hurt feelings, big egos, and so forth. No, I will not list those topics here to avoid invoking them, but most of them are political. Sometimes they get just as toxic as twitter and reddit, just with less namecalling since that'll get you flagged off with a quickness.
On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
"If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all."
They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats.
You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them.
I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.
The political differences here are often stark. You also have a fair amount of Independents here which makes this place a bit more tolerable for me. I really can't stand left-wing or right-wing ideologues, much less the extremists.
HN caters to people from all across the US (most of the audience is outside Silicon Valley and the global audience continues to grow based on dangs postings).
You could say it's mostly male, but I've seen more usernames with women's names in them.
I have a dream that one day, there will be no political parties, only nuanced, informed debate on stand-alone issues. Tribal groupthink is one of my pet peeves (isn't that the tao of flat-earthers?) because it often places loyalty over honesty. Elections are almost as bad because they've devolved into celebrity popularity contests.
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party, and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently - and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.
― Gore Vidal
Maybe it's me, but I don't think about participants' gender or if there's enough/too much of any particular attribute group. I infer your point is that HN extends well-beyond the stereotypical academic, software engineer, or tech entrepreneur: male, Caucasian/Asian/Indian subcontinental, high-income or college student, SF to Milpitas.
Vidals assessment of Democrats is a bit rosey, I think. This reflects the average dishonesty in politics though. An equally rosey picture of Republicans or equally bleak picture of Democrats (or both) would've made better sense in an honest reflection.
The rest of this is pretty spot on, and your assessment of my sentiment was spot on.
HN is not pursuing 10%/week growth, "engagement" etc. It doesn't care for bots, viral posts, there's a small, definable ruleset and largely enforceable.
It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts!
That's definitely true. Without messing up a good thing (HN), I wonder though how similar community platforms could be constructed incrementally better in terms of reasonableness, fairness, ethical/principled/respectful debate, curiosity, quality people, and signal.
It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place.
HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned.
HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations.
I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
Your experience on HN does not resemble mine at all. I'm frequently downvoted for controversial opinions. And I see a lot of outrage and disinformation here.
And on twitter I see little outrage and disinformation. Our experiences are so far apart on social media that I'm not sure anecdotes will do much for the conversation here.
Anything critical of the failure that is the United States, it's crumbling democracy or the Frank insanity inflicted upon the world by the psychopaths operating out of silicon valley. Unbridled Capitalism of the American variety is cruel and big tech is complicit in propagating antidemocratic efforts through walled gardens and mass tailored propaganda.
How's that?
>I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
That's probably because you don't post any opinions that the HN hivemind finds controversial. Stray outside the lines just a bit and expect moderator censure and downvotes/flags.
It's hard but possible, I find, to post and discuss controversial things. You have to be very carefull how you present the topic, and you have to put a lot more effort into the discussion than you normally might to make sure it doesn't devolve, but if you wade through and cut off the drive-by commenters that misunderstand your position because they aren't actually bothering to think critically about it,and try to try to keep the discussion it on track, you sometimes get very interesting discussions out of it.
Sometimes I end up softening or changing someone's position on something, sometimes I soften or change mine or learn a lot of new things, and I have to imagine that happens with some lurkers as well, and I'm not sure what more I could hope for, besides wishing it was easier sometimes.
Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-Reddits (/r/atheism coughcough) delete links to scientific evidence showing AA efficacy: https://archive.is/gEXfA Why let facts get in the way of a good social networking rage fest?
Certain topics like politics or war or religion or LGBT will always tend to produce flame wars and "toxic wasteland" no matter which platform. The technical threads are usually a lot better.
The difference is visibility. A few hours into a conversation, the top two comments are, more often than not, a well-reasoned argument for one side and a well-reasoned rebuttal. If you start in on a thread while it's early, you'll see a lot of garbage, but that tends to float to the bottom over time. In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense.
Twitter is the opposite. The most inflammatory comments trigger the most engagement, and so get the most visibility.
I don't agree with that. I think often hours in, the top comments often get more offensive here. Not less. The garbage floating to the bottom is not my experience here.
> In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense
I don't see this happening on HN. The shallow nonsense isn't the problem, it's the hateful opinions and "carefully reasoned, smart sounding" racism that is the problem. Calling it shallow nonsense makes it sound like no big deal or low effort hate posts. But that's not what I'm talking about.
People say the worst things here but they use a large vocabulary and so it seems to get a pass. The hate here is very similar to the hate I see elsewhere and often it is much much worse here than on Twitter, in my personal experience.
Ah, okay, I understand better what you're saying. So you do perceive Twitter as different than HN, but only in quality of writing, not in lack of hateful content.
Can you give an example of a thread that turned out that way? I'm genuinely curious if I've been missing something, or if I've just managed to steer clear of topics that end up like that.
I'm on Hacker News more than I care to admit and I don't see evidence of this widespread racism you proclaim. Please provide evidence if you're going to make these wild accusations.
I'm scratching my head on this one. There are passive-aggressive haters in the world, but I don't see much of that around here. People around these parts usually keep their biases to themselves or outright flaunt them and get hammered for it.
$5 words instead of plain speak is an accessibility problem but anti-intellectualism never solved anything. Maybe inferiority feelings or catastrophizing? Do what I do, subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. :) Go through the GRE prep materials if you want a bigger vocab. Heck, I would get a used unabridged dictionary and make it a point to work from cover-to-cover. Watch those obnubilated smarty-pants shudder in fear. :)
Please provide some specific examples. Even with examples, the important question is about how frequent they are, but without examples, your statement is just your personal experience.
PS: Your usage of “smart racism,” “nazis,” “homophobes” etc are strong bayesian evidence (to me) that you’re just looking to guilt-trip people and victimize yourself. The only kind of racism I have seen on HN is the kind I see literally everywhere: people don’t really care about people not in their bubbles. This is better named selfishness than racism, and it’s inherent in human nature. (If you’re curious, I am middle-eastern, and not exactly binary myself; I have been abused when I was younger for being “transgenderish.” Which kind of forced me to adopt more conforming, binary social masks.)
I've seen explicit scientistic (scientific-sounding) racism on HN somewhat frequently, usually as a mintoriy opinion, but somewhat tolerated - generally in discussions about IQ, stuff like The Bell Curve. Homophobia I've seen much more rarely, though maybe I didn't hit the right topics.
I've also seen anti-religious sentiments and anti-chinese nationalism popping up pretty proeminintely every now and again. Climate change denial is also rarely missing from any longer conversation about climate.
Dang's response came 4 days after the comment was written. Before being flagged, it was downvoted, but not to hell - it was gray, but still readable, like most of that poster's other comments. So I would say that someone may be justified in feeling somewhat attacked and not that well defended on such topics. As I said, it's a minority opinion, but it is somewhat tolerated.
Ideally, when someone claims that they can tell how smart someone is from how they look, that should be downvoted to oblivion and receive overwhelming counter-evidence or no attention at all.
Of course, what happened was quite OK, and much better than many other corners of the internet. But still, it's proof that that there is some explicit racism on HN, not just people not caring about others.
I understand the linearity of the Shrodinger equation under a model which MW entails. However, you are sidestepping the randomness involved in the choice of world that you reside in. You can dress it up all you want, but your consciousness is bound to one world of the many worlds. And that is a defacto random phenomena.
I’ve been abused all my life by religion, and the Iranian regime (which all evidence points to being much milder than the Chinese dictatorship). You’re no different than your predecessors; What are you doing to help people that actually goes against your bubble’s conventions? It’s not exactly an achievement to be pro-gay etc when gays etc are your bubble’s current fad.
I do not understand your point in any way. You claimed that there are no racists on HN and that claiming there are suggests someone is a drama queen. I pointed to some racists on HN to show that at least some do exist.
What does this have to do with doing something about the Iranian regime or Chinese regime or any other regime? I barely even discussed homophobia.
And note that you can be anti-fundamentalist without being anti religion, and you can be against the Chinese regime without being anti Chinese people (just like you can be anti Israel without being antisemitic).
I loathe all ads, so HN is great in that aspect. The design is good with its beige and orange, very simple no pretentiousness. Also the community is smart and usually thoughtful in both replies and posts. Its really the only 'social media' I participate in.
The user base is sufficiently pretentious to bring the site up to the expected pretentiousness baseline for an SV product. Just needs a bit of quiet ukulele music in the background to really get it over the line consistently.
If they introduce targeted ads or up-votes/interactions could be monetized in HN, even with the the same community, you would start to see the deterioration IMHO.
Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!
I think the major ingredient for HN is focus on topics that are interesting to "techinical" people. When you focus on particular set of activities it becomes easier to just say no to a lot of other contents.
I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.
I don't think that's the only thing going on. Twitter has code written and an ML model trained to actively and intentionally surface material of indeterminate quality that is likely to drive engagement. HN has people using moderation and upvoting to surface material of high quality assuming that drives engagement.
The reason for that is HN is not for direct profit, has a charter, is not afraid to moderate content, via flag, and to bar people, via marking them as dead, and actively hunts spam and trolls.
If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.
Any open social media platform where you can choose who you follow and who sees or doesn’t see your content is effectively an invite-only platform.
Twitter is pretty close to that, except it’s default opt-in rather than default opt-out. Meaning everyone can see your content by default, rather than you having to explicitly allow rando’s to see your content and reply to you.
But if you follow people who make high-quality posts, and unfollow, mute, and/or block people who produce all noise and no signal, you’ll have a pretty good professional and personal networking experience.
Most other social media have ways of curating your feed, but you have to proactively do it, can’t just rely on the social media platform to do it for you.
We have had moderated platforms for discussion, but when people don't like being told they're wrong (especially when they are) they create their own.
Personal details don't deter it, as shown by the various platforms that were inhabited by the alt-right. There's a cultural lack of responsibility for the truth.
> - login required to view content, no search engine spidering
Why do you think this is a good thing?
> - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
I see two ways that could go: either somewhere that China and/or Russia have control over, or in an unstable third-world dictatorship. Do you have any specific countries where none of the above would apply, or do you prefer one of the latter two to the US and EU?
No search engine spidering so discussions aren't monetized or ripped-off, discussions can be freer (half-way to being YC dinners), and potentially greater incentives to apply.
Most of those things are good, but they address symptoms more than root causes I think.
The root cause is that platforms like Twitter rely on engagement (and maybe more importantly, growth of said engagement) for their lifeblood.
When that's the case, the incentive will always be to increase engagement at all costs and nothing drives engagement like flamewars and other lowest common denominator garbage.
Additionally, as long as the social currency is "how much other members of the userbase like your posts" you'll wind up with either a single hivemind or multiple warring factions IMO (e.g. conservatives vs. liberals on FB)
HN manages to keep its discourse level fairly high because of this, I believe. HN does not need to grow nor generate revenue directly. A Twitter-alike, curated as strictly as HN, might work. It might even be able to turn a profit, if the goal was sustainable profit and not some impossible dream of unbounded growth concocted by investors wanting the next trillion-dollar hit.
Many social media platforms have tried this and failed Even at the lowest level of having to get an invite from someone you know - its never worked:
- Clubhouse
- Google+
- ELLO
- Mastodon
The paradox here is you need people to generate sustainable communities. When you don't have enough people, users will stop using the platform. Another classic case of this is all the "decentralized" social platforms like Diaspora and others. Great idea, great implementation, but without enough people, its doomed to fail.
I agree nearly completely with the inherent failur-proneness of invite-only networks, and participated in three of the four you mention. I'd dispute Mastodon as invite-only however.
That said, the exception is a network created for an extant community. In fact, most of the major successful social media networks have emerged from just such a community, and quite frequently one that's academically oriented.
Email, Usenet, and Facebook all emerged out of academia. Email and Usenet with early Arpanet and major research universities. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Several other early networks such as The WELL and Slashdot were strongly adjacent to these.
Several early BBS systems emerged out of or alongside military service communities. I don't recall if it was AOL, Prodigy, or another early network which was strongly popular among US military personnel and families (a large, reasonably cohesive community, widely distributed, with contacts and ongoing communications in distant locations).
YC's HN would be another example.
But generally, creating an early cohesive community is a challenge, and many of the tricks for short-cutting this process tend also to greatly diminish the long-term value and prospects of the discussion platform.
My own contention is that Google+ actually did have a strong internal-to-the-network (not just Google) community (though one that excluded a great many people). I feel the social network hurt itself by trying to open too quickly (Ello certainly did), as well as by Google's own greatly bifurcated affinity groups: technologists on the one hand, and marketers on the other. Marketing/advertising is toxic to social cohesion, and this showed early in G+ evolution.
> - reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased
The more I think about those problems the more I'm convinced up- and downvotes are a mistake in general. They can only cause damage and are completely useless as they're not even used for the same thing by different people. For example when someone gets 5 downvotes it's probably for at least 2 different reasons, none of which are communicated to the poster. When I get a random downvote I'd really like to know if it was warranted, but there's no way to find out.
If any kind of rating system had to exist I'd vote for something like tags; with users being able to tag any content with any 1-2 words, and frequent ones are visible without some extra clicks. For one this would give more nuanced information, and at the same time it would make tons of content much easier to find or filter.
That reminds me of the slashdot moderation system - when a user gets modpoints they get to spend them on posts as they browse and indicate why they spent that modpoint that way (e.g. 'Troll' or 'Flamebait').
Having used many broken moderation systems and designed a few (also broken) myself, a few observations.
- Popularity itself is a very poor metric for quality. It's mostly a metric for ... popularity. Which is to say: broad appeal, simplicity, emotive appeal (or engagement), and brevity. This does however correspond reasonably well to sales and advertising metrics.
- My own goal tends toward maximised overall quality, with a high favouring of truth value and relevance.
- There's some value to a multi-point rating scale. This is called a "Likert Scale", typically an odd-number of points (3, 5, 7, ...), most commonly encountered as a star-scale system. Amazon and Uber are the most familiar of these today, and highlight failure modes. If users' ratings are rebalanced based on their own average rating, at least some of the issues go away (e.g, a very positive rater giving away 5/5 will have those ratings discounted, a conservative rater offering 3/5 on average would see those uprated). The adjusted average becomes the rebalanced rating.
- Note that a capped cumulative score is not the same as an averaged Likert score. Slashdot's moderating system is an example of the former. It ... kind of works but mostly doesn't. Highly-ranked content tends to be good, but much content deserving higher ratings is utterly ignored.
- Taking number of interactions and applying a logarithmic function tends to give a renormalised popularity score. That is, on a log-log basis, you'll tend to see a linear scaling from "1 person liked this" to "10 billion people liked this" (roughly the range of any current global-scale ratings system). See also: Power Distribution, Zipf Function.
- Unbiased and uncorrupted expertise should rate more strongly. In averaging the inputs of 300 passengers + 2 pilots for an airplane's flight controls, my preferred weighting is roughly 3300*0 and 11. Truth or competence are not popularity games.
- Sometimes a distinct "experts" vs. "everyone" scoring is useful. I've recently seen an argument that film reviews accomplish this, with the expert reviewers' scores setting expectations for "what kind of film is this" and the popular rating for "how well did this film meet established expectations"? There are very good bad films, and very bad good films, as well as very bad bad films.
- "The wisdom of crowds" starts failing rapidly where the crowd is motivated, gamed, bought, or otherwise influenced. Such behaviour must* be severely addressed if overall trust in a ratings system is to remain.
- Areas of excellence ("funny", "informative", "interesting", etc.) are somewhat useful but very often the cost of acquiring that information is excessively high. Indirect measures of attributes may be more useful, and there's some research in this area (Microsoft conducted studies on classification of Usenet threads based on their "shape", in the 2000s. Simply based on the structure of reply chains, there were useful classifications: "dead post", "troll", "flameware", "simple question everybody can answer", "hard question many can guess at but one expert knows the answer", etc.
- Actual engagement with content, even just for a voting or other action is a small fraction of total views. Encouraging more rating behaviour often backfires. Make do with the data that occurs naturally, incentivised contribution skews results.<...
There are many people who can think critically who also happen to use Twitter just as any other public space. Frankly your comment comes off as condescending and aloof so I can see why it didn't go well.
I don’t think I said there weren’t, I was only referring to the posts that were clearly incorrect - they exist everywhere, but Twitter allows misinformed posters to have their speech elevated to the same level as sitting senators.
> Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science?
It would be lovely to have a platform/forum where the whole concept was just that the moderation would ban people not only for spreading misinformation or making ad-hominem attacks, but also for applying unsound logic / not citing sources when asked / etc. All the same stuff that'd get a journal paper rejected during peer-review.
(With public records of moderator decisions, and the ability to appeal a decision; but where the "appeals process" just translates to your post going through a Slashdot-like "bunch of regular users given temporary moderation duties approve/deny your post" — which, given the type of user who'd want to be on a platform like this, likely wouldn't be any more friendly to your post than the mods would be.)
It'd sure be a niche platform, but that'd match well with how much work the moderation staff would have to do to keep up with discussion on it. I'd pay to be there!
(Yes, this is what scientific journals were originally supposed to be: heavily-moderated public forums for conversation between scientists. They don't serve this function well any more, as they've been parasitized by the function of serving the needs of academic clout-seekers.)
Its an extremely hard problem to solve. How do you hire the moderators and how to you track if they're doing a good job? You will need to hire experts in multiple fields. Things get especially tricky when you go into super specialized fields and only a person working in that field can smell the BS.
I work in biotech, and lets pretend I'm an expert on a topic- say immunology. When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? No amount of money is going to persuade me - but that's just me ofcource.
> When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them?
Turn it around. Make it like Reddit's /new: have moderators able to sift through countless posts about misinformation and approve the good ones. It's not a large difference in what moderators end up doing — they still have to at least skim over all the misinformation. But it's psychologically very different — you can just "walk away" from annoying things that stink of quackery up-front, while "engaging with" only the things that seem good, and eventually "upvoting" the things that still seem good even after you've read them carefully.
Yes, I'm actually suggesting that every post on such a site would go through a moderation queue. (Just one that any user can dip into to look at, if they like, but only moderators can actually vote on.) Or, if not every post, then a good sampling of them; or maybe every post from users with less than N approved posts.
The big effect of that would be that there wouldn't be "countless posts about misinformation." There'd be a couple, mostly by new users with clear signal of that user just being an attacker to the community who doesn't actually want to become part of it (and therefore, can just be banned wholesale.) Noise would drop over time, because crackpots wouldn't even get a short blip of engagement. They'd get none. Their account would die in the crib, never witnessed by anyone but moderators and curious /new viewers.
Combine it with a KYC mechanism (so users can't keep making new accounts) and the moderation load actually becomes reasonable.
Assuming you managed to hire an army of experts who are good at moderating the posts across various fields - Often times people also link to external articles/blogs/videos so now the moderators have to read through several page documents or sit through hours of video. I just find a moderation system like that hard to practically implement for a platform like twitter. And to be honest, I see this as going down a dark path - something that will lead to the 'Ministry of Truth' type entities with their own in-groups/fighting/politics.
That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith - they're not bad-actors looking to attack the community.
Those are just my thoughts, but what do I know, I'm not an expert on these topics :)
> Assuming you managed to hire an army of experts who are good at moderating the posts across various fields - Often times people also link to external articles/blogs/videos so now the moderators have to read through several page documents or sit through hours of video.
The moderators would never be expected to audit "posts" (top-level links to big things that need a long analysis process), just comments.
Or rather — "posts" can be, in some sense, raw evidence/data, not assertions about anything in particular. (Think e.g. a link to a scientific study. Nobody assumes that the poster of such a link is asserting, through the link, that they believe the study's own conclusions to be true — just that they believe the study to be interesting in some way — worth discussing.)
Moderators would be expected to poke their head into a post link for just long-enough to confirm that it's that "artifact to be interpreted" kind of post. If it is, it's allowed to stand.
Whereas "comments" — those that are part of a post alongside the link, or those in reply/reference to a post — are almost always the conclusions drawn from the data, editorialization by the participant user(s). Those are what need moderating.
If you prune only the bad comments, then bad posts no longer matter, because their engagement (which is univerally in the form of bad comments) disappears, and so the post itself is no longer "interesting" according to any kind of social recommendation system.
("Posts" can also be external-to-the-platform editorializations/opinion pieces. I would suggest just banning this type of content altogether. Moderator notices an external link is to an opinion piece? Out it goes. If you want to talk about some externally-written Op/Ed in the forum, you'd have to "import" it into the forum in full text — at which point it would be subject to moderation, and would also be the karmic responsibility of whoever chose to "import" it. You'd be claiming the words of the Op/Ed as your words. Like reading something into evidence in a court room — if it turns out to be faked evidence, that's libel on the part of whichever party introduced it.)
> are good at moderating the posts across various fields
I see what I think you're imagining here, but I never meant to imply that moderators are required to actually verify that statements are true (which requires domain knowledge), only to verify on a syntactic level that the poster is engaging in valid logic to derive conclusions from evidence via syllogisms/induction/etc. (which only requires an understanding of epistemics and rhetoric.) Basically, as long as the poster seems to be behaving in good faith, they're fine. It's up to the userbase themselves to notice whether the logic is sound — built on true assumptions.
In other words, the point of the moderators is to catch the same types of things a judge will notice and subtract points for in a debating society. But instead of points, your post just never shows up because it wasn't approved; and you edge closer to being banned.
> That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith
I mean, that's the main thing I'd want to stop in its tracks: repeating things without first fact-checking them. Yes, preventing people from parroting things they've "heard somewhere" without citing an independent source, would kill 99% of potential discourse on such a platform. Well, good! What'd be left is the gold I want out of the platform in the first place: primary-source posters who can cite their own externally-verifiable data; secondary-source investigative-journalists who will find and cit...
That is your mistake. People do not respond by being told how they are wrong. Instead, people will change their minds when they see that their friends do.
> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter
Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills. I'm not surprised your effort failed, I'm sure if you offered to teach me critical thinking skills I'd wonder who the heck you thought you were.
Frankly your confidence in your own impeccable critical thinking skills cast doubts. The smartest people are those who know they can be deceived. If you don't have the humility to check your own reasoning then you are probably wrong about something.
Many people can teach, but to do it successfully they must come from a place of respect and trust. If someone I know wants to teach me about their field of knowledge, that will be successful. If an anonymous stranger presents information with an attitude of "I think this will interest you as it interested me", that will be successful.
If an anonymous stranger comes to me with "Let me tell you that how you think is wrong" - yea, I don't think I'm going to buy that.
What's the difference between this and pointing out how someone's argument is flawed? i.e. "You said 'X therefore Y', but following that reasoning you could say 'X implies (obviously-wrong) Z'. X is not logically incompatible with !Y because..."
(Not that this is ever successful in places like Twitter.)
"Arguement is flawed" is still in the eyes of the poster. I certainly wouldn't just unthinkingly accept this sort of feedback, and the simple truth is that internet "sources" are rarely trustworthy beyond the writer opinion.
It is still a matter of trust. Approach me with respect and I'll consider your POF. Approach me with "Your reasoning process is flawed beyond your understanding" and really - who the heck are you? In the anonymity of the internet you could be anyone.
Sounds more like relativism than nihilism. Relativism is extremely common in mainstream political and moral discourse, especially in mass media journalism. This often takes the form of "bothsidesism" or "false balance," particularly in political discourse. So often, the merits of any claim (about politics, morality, scientific facts, even very basic claims about well-documented events that happened very recently, etc.) are judged by nothing except how strongly people appear to believe in them.
You see this a lot on Hacker News too, like when the discussion touches anything related to moderation, community standards/guidelines, censorship, fact-checking, etc. A particularly popular viewpoint around here seems to be that the government (or sometimes, any powerful corporation) cannot possibly be allowed to be involved in determining the validity of any claim, particularly if that claim is controversial, i.e. there are prominent people on both sides who appear to feel strongly about the claim.
It’s more that “teach critical thinking” often just means “condescend to an internet stranger about how flawed their thought process is” which, even if their thinking is flawed, isn’t exactly a winning strategy for helping people See The Light and whatnot.
> Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills.
This point cannot be emphasized enough. I have encountered people on the opposing side of an issue who have stronger critical thinking skills than people who I agree with (and probably even myself). The differences come about due to a differences in the foundations of our knowledge or on pivotal points where neither side can claim to have an definitive answer.
I find that a lot of the "big" issues boil down to trust - in businesses, in Wall Street, in the government, in the justice system.
If one person's POV is that <institution> should help while the other person's is that <institution> can only hurt, then they are never going to agree no matter how many links and memes and snarky comebacks they throw at each other.
I mention this every time "critical thinking" is brought up.
Critical thinking is a skill that is almost useless to most people and can lead to being a net negative. It's the skill of critique. One can be amazing at critical thinking and be absurdly terrible at constructive thinking. Politics in general needs far less critique and far more construction. It's really bad to get people very aware of just how badly they're exploited but then to give them no potential solutions to solve it. That's basically what wokism has done recently. Every solution proposed by them is so unpalatable to the rest of the nation that there is no place for constructing new policies.
The left has this problem especially bad since the radical left makes being really good at critique a whole component of their intellectual tradition:
> Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills.
It's not even about critical thinking skills. The 'other side' is often starting with a completely different set of facts. The only difference being which ones were highlighted and which were omitted.
This doesn't even touch on straight up falsities yet.
Until the sides can agree on some base first principles, it's going to be a hard problem to solve.
I wouldn’t offer to teach critical thinking skills, that would be ridiculous. Instead, I would probe with questions and get them look at what they were posting more clearly or refer back to actual sources.
I also said it was a fools errand - something that had little chance of succeeding against the waves of misinformation on Twitter. And finally, you’re right that knowing you can be wrong and challenging your own beliefs is fundamental to critical thinking.
I think that's fair. The internet is full of people who won't even go to the effort of reading the article they are confidently promoting as the truth. Sometimes something as simple as "actually this study is about lions. not people" is enough to bust some people's bubbles.
But a person posting on HN is statistically more likely to be the critical thinker when compared to the Twitter baseline.
The whole thing is philosophically weird, but practically speaking, one can somewhat know that people saying aliens built the pyramids are the ones lacking critical thinking. For example, I don’t think people promoting the cancel culture lack critical thinking, even though I’d bet on it being a long-term disaster. But most anti-vaccers are pretty obviously lacking some critical thinking skills.
It’s generally the ability to tell your political interests apart from your epistemic knowledge. In simpler terms, the ability to engage less in wishful thinking. While perfection is impossible, I do think it’s possible to improve in this ability. Proving it to others is another challenge; You probably need to predict counterintuitive results consistently for people to somewhat trust in you.
Politicians are the worst people to follow on Twitter outside of maybe conspiracy theorists. Well, some politicians are both.
It's better to follow creative people. They tend to have much more interesting things to say. Follow people like John Carmack, Simone Giertz, or The Onion instead.
You almost have to follow politicians or news if you wanted to keep up on the vaccine and re-opening front. Following news outlets is about the same in terms of replies.
Well, you could get your news from news sites directly rather than following them on Twitter! Then you're very unlikely to see stupid replies. (But choose news sites that either don't have comments at all or at least hide them by default.)
My Twitter experience isn't nearly as good as it was some years ago, to be sure, but I follow fairly few people outside the "friends of friends" perimeter and rarely follow people who are given to performative outrage, even if they are people I generally agree with. While I do block people occasionally, I'm more free with "mute temporarily", "mute forever" and, importantly, "turn off retweets" -- that can have an almost magically cleansing effect on your timeline.
Following politicians is fine. It's the replies to politicians that are never going to be worthwhile. There's no discussion there, just rants and cheers.
Global warming could be a cyclical process, just like covid could have come from a lab, and hand-drawn charts don't make it any more or less true. The two (claim and charts) can be separated, that is part of "critical thinking."
> I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator
I very much find the Twitter experience is what you make of it. I did it wrong the first time I tried twitter, and I hated and abandoned it, too.
Second time around, I started with a handful of tech people that post interesting content or work in projects I'm involved or interested in, and organically grew from there. I also follow a couple people that post local (to my small city) traffic/news/etc. And within the last year, I follow some people that post COVID stuff about my region, who produce charts and stuff that are 10x more useful than the official government sources (eg: updated and realistic R calculations, include charts with hospitalizations/deaths, etc).
What is absolutely not useful is anything political (the replies to COVID stuff tend to get political, so I also ignore that), or pretty much anything in "trending".
Also don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people, and click "Not interested in this -> show fewer retweets/likes from this person" -- all things that have made it tolerable and even useful. If disinformation/lies or other similar nonsense starts getting in my feed, I do what I need to get rid of it. This has meant sometimes unfollowing someone I otherwise like (eg, they're replying that disinformation and causing fights) but honestly, it's just not worth it to me.
Dude when ISIS was a big thing, I had a phase when I would try to debate the recruiters on Twitter (the guys who "thank the lions", write half arabic half english and seem to live in the middle east). This was fun time :D
Twitter is such a trash, I mean on the IRC at least you can split in groups, kick out and prevent unsignaled readership. On twitter millions can read a random shit without segregation it's awful.
I had to get away from it when the US required foreigners to disclose their twitter accounts upon entry, with all my ISIS "friends"...
Im amazed Twitter doesn't have a report option for misinformation like Facebook has. But whats worse is if you report someone for making violent threats you get an instantly email, and I mean instant, saying they found nothing wrong.
As for elected officials, I wish they'd just disable replies altogether for them. Nothing good comes from it.
Lmao. It's true. This is why I don't have identifiable social media and don't use it even anonymously except for limited purposes. Cyberdisinhibitionism is strongest when there are no repercussions to poor behavior, too much anonymity, flame/troll/instigators/touchy comments, and no manifestation of the person on the receiving-end. It's basically a sewer factory factory with a teaspoon of sugar sprinkled-in. I think it proves that either most people are disengaged and/or the most vocal people are the worst. (Proving your point). Maybe there should be a cost to post that increases proportional to increasing frequency too.
The irony is, translating to IRL, I apparently discovered I have this semi-employed, "macho" no-shirt neighbor who accused me of being racist for asking if they had an entrance keyfob to prevent tailgating into an access-controlled apartment building. Then they talked about all the (nonexistent) "cameras" around, began recording me (for what, I don't know), using racist slurs, and tried to start a physical fight (they're half my weight, like a yappy chihuahua). I'm wondering if they're schizophrenic and narcissistic, in addition to appearing like a victim-mentality crybully crybaby. My point is perhaps people are taking their online behaviors into the real world.
PS: You should've heard what Latinx gangbangers called me when I was a kid. I never got beaten-up because I was bigger than all of them, but I learned the finer points of swearing in Spanish. :) I understand the tall blade of grass gets clipped so I don't take any of it personally.
"Latinx" (pronounced "Latin-X", like "Malcom X") is a very common term among people who think they're better than other people, and Chicago politicians.
It's supposed to be an all-encompassing term for "Laino" and "Latina," but only serves to divide people further. Like almost every other ethnic rebranding of the last ten years.
Amazing that you're downvoted. Latino is in fact what Spanish speaking people use, and they despise how woke gringos are trying to modify their language.
There is a zero percent chance that a latino gang banger would call themselves latinx. It's a word invented by Americans for a specific context but it's been rejected by the Royal Spanish Academy, which guides all Spanish curriculums in all Spanish speaking countries. It's also unpronounceable to a monolingual native Spanish speaker anyways. Neither consonant cluster exists in Spanish: "latinks" and "latin-ecks" both need a vowel around the k to sound natural.
It's ok to say latino, it's not a non-inclusive word. Grammatical gender is not tied to gender identity, grammatical gender is just an arbitrary designation to make word endings complement each other and "sound right". German has 3 genders, Spanish has two. You could call them A words and B words, Red words and blue words, and it wouldn't change their usage. Spanish speakers don't actually think books are boys and tables are girls.
Seems like bikeshedding on an irrelevant tangent. I'm trying to do whatever this gender-sensitive thing is that I'll get crap for if I do or don't do. Next, the safety pins will call Romance languages sexist for having gendered words.
Sorry I probably wrote too much I didn't want to be that person who just angrily points something out without explaining why. Some might take it that when a Spanish speaker opposes latinx they're opposing LGBTQ and I wanted to clear that up.
Maybe it is more about just monetizing anything on the web?
I kinda suspect the notion of most of these services just being free and not resorting to really unpleasant ad systems and dark patterns and such ... just not viable generally.
I don't know I see a lot of great stuff from comedians and stuff on twitter posting all kind of shit. I enjoy the silliness, but my feed is definitely highly curated and even then I end up seeing toxic takes because people "like" the takes that I follow.
However, some of my absolute favorite twitter accounts post a lot. To each their own. I don't have to hit the button.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Too drastic IMO. Some of the best posts I've read on Twitter come in threads, a chain of consecutive tweets by the same author. I would propose instead an option to filter profanity, most of the low value, or plain harmful, tweets use offensive words.
Maybe a warning that your tweet will get a drastically reduced audience for using X or Y words, so the poster can rephrase it before submitting?
If you follow the right people then Twitter is amazing. But the out of the box experience is wretched. TikTok for example quickly finds out what you want to see. Twitter puts that burden on you.
> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
Twitter is already profitable today, even without this subscription service.
Fwiw the small world of Japanese software engineering Twitterverse is quite a pleasant, funny (punny), and constructive place. I’ve actually made many RL friends through the medium.
my curated twitter feed was sincerely (and i'm a jaded guy when it comes to internet) awesome.. creative coders, intelligent and fun people, some feud here and there but nothing spectacular
it's a pity most of twitter seems to be a perpetual shitstorm of low effort brainless buzz
ps: out of the whole internet debasement.. I kinda see something, is that talk has a purpose, if I talk to someone I'd rather have a nice moment, and the ability to debate endlessly with people I don't even (or bots even) is fruitless. a strange kind of lesson on using ones times correctly
Use debate to learn, not to change somebody's mind. Then it's not fruitless, even if it's endless or with a bot. If you're using it to change somebody's mind, you'll be incapable of allowing yourself to think critically since that can only cause you to fail at your purpose.
Yeah: when you debate you never change someones mind, especially DURING the debate. The very first rule of debating is that you try to change the mind of the public reading it, not the debaters.
Now what you learn is mostly to argue your way around your opinion better, not exactly to change it. But why would you: you change your opinion when looking for insight (reading a book), not when looking for a win (debating on an advertisement platform).
Debate for an audience is kind of awful. You have to sacrifice your honesty and ethics to score cheap points that don't actually show you're right but can fool the causal audience. What's the value of that though? You've convinced some strangers of a fact that you don't even know is true yourself. It's just creating fake knowledge pollution.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
This is why Twitter should be an open protocol, and people should be able to write their own UserAgents. Users should be in control of the filtering, not the app or the company.
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.
There are multiple sections of Twitter and some communities are extremely toxic, but it’s also the single best place to follow breaking events. If you follow the right people it can be extremely informative, and highlights how often news bloggers get basic facts wrong.
One recent example, there was a news report that famous short seller Michael Burry had taken a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla. This number came from a basic misreading of Burry’s disclosure, but the news media ran with it and an article with this number showed up on the HN front page. If you followed the right people on Twitter you knew the number was wrong within minutes, while the news media has still not issued a correction. This situation happens all the time.
Why is anything important? Investing is interesting to me and I want accurate information free from somebody else’s agenda. That’s not possible, but aggregating the opinions of many people I respect is the closest I’ve found.
I can't see why you'd think that was a mistake, the people promulgating the [false] news report almost certainly are investing against the information they're putting out. That's what "news" owners do, surely.
"Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying."
Only if you are looking for deep thoughtful comments. Twitter need not be that place. It could be a place to amplify the voices of the oppressed some of which may sound like noise. This kind of voice has never been available through mainstream media like cable or T.V.
Which part of 'highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims' isn't perfect for monetization?
>Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying
There is a good reason they hid the tweet count, because most of the biggest names on twitter actually have Tweet counts that if you divide them by hours since their join date it would be as high as 0.8 to 1.2 tweets an hour every hour 24 hours a day for 11 years+
Once you learn this it puts those users in a very different perspective and they no longer seem like people you should be listening to.
you're ignoring the time required to find things to respond to and just how many times they're scrolling that timeline a day to hit numbers so high for 11+ years.
I would say 1,5 pages of text each day of year is pretty respectable output. Or at least would be with most other mediums. Like if all that effort was used on something else it could be 1-2 books a year?
>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
That's most "engagement" on the internet, lol. Twitter is bad but it's not like all the other social media platforms are that much better. It's just how some people behave socially (anonymous or not, it doesn't seem to matter), at least when they're not meaningfully focusing on some worthwhile goal or pursuit like most of us are here @ HN. And trying to stop it with heavy-handed authoritarian policies only makes it worse as people strive to abuse the policies themselves to troll and gain power over others.
Hmm I try to stay on Twitter because it’s friendly and constructive rather than on Facebook. I guess it depends on who you follow. Unlike Facebook (where follows are social for better or worse) Twitter lets you set up a feed of interesting/friendly people and the (social) cost of unfollowing someone is usually zero.
I recently started to use Facebook to stay/get in touch with friends and family from previous lives.
My rule when using it is that I only interract with personal photos/stories, or stuff posted publicly.
I completely ignore postings that are not personal and to friend only (not public). Facebook has (or had?) huge potential for people to keep in touch but its bigger issue are private gardens where people can spin up opinions into silliness with no opportunity for anybody from outside their echo chamber to criticize and debunk.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
I wish we can moderate this conclusion — it’s not fair to dismiss all these people as if they are all the same.
I personally believe that most of this toxicity is induced. I don’t think most humans are toxic by nature.
Can you blame victims of war for their tireless online activism? So what that they turn toxic, can you blame them when they are continuously facing mis/dis-information on a topic they are experiencing first hand? Yet this group can appear as toxic as any on Twitter.
We can criticize but not to the point of unilaterally dismissing these groups as if they are equal. A climate-change denier is not equal to a Gazan teen “journalist but only through tweets”. Both may annoy you with their “perpetual beef” but it’s not really fair to abandon the one good thing this platform has done - give people a voice. We need to just learn to deal with it.
I’m not sure what the impact of this will be, but I hope it won’t be the undermining of grass-roots activism. Even if that activism can border on toxic.
> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic
Heh funny I had the exact inverse assumption: that maybe they realized single-minded attempts to monetize only engagement exacerbates toxic human behaviour.
I'm thinking the truth is probably somewhere between both.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
+1 on this thinking! But more vibing with the idea of imposed scarcity, rather that the hyper-customized view of the world.
Related: I personally feel that more elements of consensus reality should play a role in our digital spaces, not each getting our own view just because we can have it. Just because we can fine-tune our reality to our preferences, that doesn't mean that's good for a system for its actors to do so highly. Imho there's a reason human minds generally all evolved to be mostly on the same page in terms of perceived reality (except for a few subtle knobs on some generally minor axes). And the neurotypes that break theses consensus reality rules are generally perceived as maladapted and tend to be ostracized (e.g. schizophrenia, barring value judgements about their treatment in society). I do believe there's an evolutionary lens to place over that vague shared sensibility (ie. what underlying feature of network dynamics did evolution "learn" and tune into?) and imho this all informs how we might build tech :)
> highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
This is self inflicted. My Twitter feed feels like a really big friend group talking/joking about anime, tech, finance, etc. You are quite literally the company you keep on Twitter.
> Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
You won't get far taking the website this serious.
(I should add that I'm black and so are most of the people I follow so it's possible I'm basing this off a group of people that already have some larger sense of community off the bat)
Not totally accurate. I have a highly curated twitter made up of finance and tech yet the suggested trends are HORRIBLE. Wonderful topics such as "Nazis", "RacistSoAndSo", "JimCrow", "UncleTom" etc etc etc.
Its a black hole, pile on of hate. I call it the trending two minutes of hate; and its built in with no way of turning it off.
It's much better if you train yourself to ignore that sidebar. I'm sure with the right plugin you could just hide it permanently via css if it's distracting.
That’s strange. My current suggested trends are “Future Hendrix” (rapper), “Kanye”, and “No Way Home” (the Spider-Man movie).
If I had to guess I’d say it goes off what your following is interacting with/talking about at the moment. I notice they get more negative when my timeline is talking about something more controversial.
I dont have twitter, but I click in twitter links here and there when they are posted on forums. Every time I scroll down from whatever tweet was linked, I seem to immediately end up seeing what I would consider partisan stuff about covid or other current events. Maybe on a personal feed it is different but it does seem set up to lure people into debate or disagreement.
I think the point is that random tweets - especially replies - may be low quality. But the 'curated' tweets from those you follow are much more likely to have value.
Honestly CryptoTwitter, the part that isn't all scams, is the only tolerable part of twitter I've found. It's mostly shitposts and jokes, with the occasional good deed like raising money for people in unfortunate circumstances. Every other community I've encountered on Twitter is a dumpster fire. A perpetual competition to see who is the most oppressed.
Besides the gamified nature of crypto, I think what makes CT such a hopeful place is the way everyone shares the same goal of “making it” and keeps the reason they do it in mind. Even in hard times (like now) they can keep laughing because it may all be worth it in the end.
Compare this to politics where the end is never in sight and the goal posts are eternally moving.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
I'm not a huge twitter user (~2-5 mins a day, read-only), but I tend to do this manually. If I notice that an account is taking up the majority of my wall space I tend to unfollow. After iterating a few times I ended up with a decently balanced wall.
I think a major problem and source of toxicity with twitter is it has become an acceptable and cheap source for journalists to get quotes from celebrities and politicians that Facebook and other social media platforms have not yet gotten the same traction. On the flip side it is an easy way to get a quote out there without having to answer/dodge follow up questions. Trump's power was not his twitter followers, but that anything outrageous he tweeted became front page news.
It also has to do with Twitter's complete incompetence at leveraging the information they have to create something monetizable in general.
Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter.
Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact.
Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package.
The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures).
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Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man.
Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope.
Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut.
There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find)
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Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all.
I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics.
It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through.
It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like
The problem is fundamental to their design; Any time I've ever wanted to respond to a tweet I can't seem to fit what I'm trying to say within their character limit and by the time I've shortened what I'm trying to say enough to fit that limit I've condensed my viewpoint into nothing more than a soundbite and soundbite statements are always going to cause arguments no matter your intent.
What I really dislike about Twitter it’s how different users play by different rules.
Take the name for example. Any other platform has a clear written or unwritten rule.
- HN: usernames
- LinkedIn: real names
- Twitter: a mix
On Twitter, you clearly lose out if you put your real name out there. You suddenly get trolled by strange avatars hiding their identity and very little community control.
That's a good observation. LinkedIn is so boring and chill, you can actually have difficult debates on there with everyone being polite and accepting lol
What's strange is facebook. The fact it's more segregated by close circle make the discussion nastier than on linkedin when you have your company name on top of your mean troll.
>but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now.
What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views. I don't like the idea of banning someone for simply holding a view, or forcing someone to align with an ideology of choice. "Platform X is awful" is actually "People are awful".
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Why not just avoid Twitter ? In any transactional setting you need to give something to get something. Twitter as a commercial entity needs users frequenting their platform and as therefore most comments on any social media platform are low going to be low quality (including HN).
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society?
A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? Or a terrorist disguised as a village idiot can do the same? Then sure yes Twitter is a great personification of our current society(ies).
>A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse?
That is not accurate. The reality is the opposite of what you said. The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. People only interact with content/people they agree with and this is causing social media bubbles.
> The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say.
It's based on inflated numbers derived from false information. Tell me this - if you saw two adjacent town square forums and one person had 10 people listening and another one had 100 people listening to them, what are the odds the 111th person goes to listen to one over the other? The 100 people of course. This is effectively how twitter works, but can be gamed by fake "crowds" of bots.
So, yes people are voluntarily listening to those with influence, but the gatherers are given inaccurate information to make that decision. The distinction is important.
Personification != same thing. I think you missed the point.
> That's not possible with sound waves at the town square.
Huh? I can simply not go into the town square.
> If we all agreed that twitter was trash and we all just stop going, then it's over - that village idiot has no power.
Exactly. but there are enough people benefitting from Twitter that they simply don't care that the village idiot has power (or they are the village idiot themselves).
People with shitty opinions existing in a disparate fashion is one hell of a lot different than people existing in large groups with shitty opinions affecting others' lives.
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views
This is a little shallow of a view, as in it is much more complicated than that. At its simplest, sure you can say Twitter is merely an outlet with no interference on the platform itself. But if you actually use it for any period of time or just follow the various ridiculous outrages it produces, you will quickly see that, just as we shape Twitter with our tweets, it itself shapes us and how we articulate ourselves, the level of discourse we expect. To be specific, Twitter favors short, “smoking gun” style arguments, that can be compressed into 240 characters or divided up into those segments for a thread. This necessarily “compresses” discourse into a series of dramatic accusations as evidence. It is not enough to say that someone made a offensive statement years ago. Instead, it becomes that that person themselves is bad or x-ist. This I think is the net negative to society and I doubt we would arrive at quite this point with Twitter’s “help.”
I don't agree with your assessment at all. People adapt. People can be awful on HN, can be awful on Twitter, can be awful on IRC, on Facebook, Discord, Youtube, you name it.
What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society?
The medium is the message. I firmly believe that the thoughtfulness and value that goes into a communication is directly proportional to its length and indirectly proportional to its age (likely due to survivorship bias). Twitter, occupying the extreme short end of both spectrums, seems to amplify the worst facets of human nature.
Books, especially old books that have remained in print (survivorship bias), seem to have somehow tapped into the better parts of human nature because they represent and stimulate discussion of ideas that have remained relevant across vast shifts in time and space, technology and culture.
The problem we have is that it's difficult to get people to read and especially engage with these old books. Schools have tried this for years with little success. Many (North American) students will gladly tell you how little love they have for Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, 1984, etc. Thoughtfulness and the slow burn of classic literature just don't have the same gratification feedback loop that people get from Twitter, I suppose.
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society?
Twitter isn't just a reflection, though, it's a feedback loop. It takes a stream of ideas (usually ill-considered) from a ridiculous number of people and sends them directly to the people that it expects will be most emotionally affected by them. Those people then absorb those ideas and either react with anger or support, feeding the system with new material to repeat the cycle.
If Twitter simply reflected society, it would have done no harm. But instead it's amplified the most animalistic part of our collective nature.
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
Yes, that could also monetise it so it is only two free post per day and accumulate maximum of 10 before twitter charge them $ per tweet.
And more RSS Reader like features.
I could categorise people into different topics. Today I dont want to see any shit storm on politics, so I wont click on it. I only want to see tech and economics.
Right now moving to list and making them working in harmony with the main feed is a bag of hurt.
Very surprising that's your takeaway. Sure twitter has shitbags but it is probably the only social media platform I engage with. It is a treasure trove of information and insights by folks I normally would not know about.
Twitter is a huge space and your experience comes down to what your bubble on Twitter is. The self development/Indie hacker/Tech/Devs/AI/Product/Life Lessons bubble, while still pretentious, at least is way better than the Celebrity/Cancel culture/Outrage bubble.
It’s election time here in Iran, and this time, we have essentially a one-man election, which is sth rare here (there usually are at least two candidates who can possibly win, and even though both of them are inside people already vetted by the regime, they have some small differences. At least, they are supported by different demographics.). I went to see what people were saying about this on Twitter, and did some basic searches on an account that doesn’t follow almost anyone. The results were pretty much all (90%) pro-government, and pro-one-candidate-elections.
Makes me wonder how much power these state actors have now that cancel culture is a thing. They can just whip up a mob and character-terror anyone they want, without being detected at all.
PS: I am not even saying these are bots. They can just pay people some meager money to do this. It’s an easy job in a country with very high unemployment. Heck, even Amazon does this in a small scale.
I agree. I’ve also been curious if everyone gets far-left wing takes (and low quality ones at that) in their “what’s happening” section or if that’s an algorithm targeting me either because it thinks I’m very left-wing or else because it thinks low quality left-wing content will make me angry and thus engage?
I used Twitter early on when a co-worker urged me to join. We had a group of co-workers who used it as an offline, corporate chat room.
Once it blew up and became toxic AF, I unfollowed everybody, started following only specific people, blogs and sites related to my industry (software development) in order to stay up to date with the goings on around me. That was it, since then, its become another basic news feed.
>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
As long as those suckers and their audience still watch your ads, you can.
The mind boggling phenomena in tech is that Twitter is essentially required now...to get a job...this is not hyperbole. The number of threads I've seen where SV companies are hiring exclusively on Twitter, and looking for a very specific type of person (well described in your post) is alarming to say the least.
EDIT: This mostly only applies to very specific positions (mostly design positions). I'm not insinuating that these companies are literally requiring Twitter. It's a bit more complex than that.
Yeah I'm in this boat, too. In the end it might mean that I am paying Twitter $3/mo and the developer of the 3rd-party app, but to circumvent all API restrictions would be worth it. It seems a little unfair that Twitter gets so much of that money when it's really the app developer who is earning most of my value.
There's a lot of great apps on App Stores that have a pricing model like this. Granted, most of them don't have millions in VC funding, but it's a fine business model that can make a tidy sum.
The first news story I saw about this only mentioned the amount. I assumed it was one-off for a new app, or maybe annual. Per month is crazy. I don’t object to subscriptions, but in so many cases the pricing is way out of line with the value.
You're not paying for the feature, you're paying for the UX, which is gated behind their unusable API (so it's impossible for a 3rd party app to achieve parity with the 1st party app).
In this case it is quite easy, like delayed send third party app need not make the API call until n seconds after the tweet to give you time to undo the change.
Sure twitter may not do it client side and have special APIs etc, however ultimately they can also really do only limited time changes, other wise the tweets already read by others would start changing.
Of course they can still pull API access for violating ToS etc, however from technology context there is nothing they can do .
These are the types of features a novice app developer might implement in an afternoon after watching a tutorial video on youtube.
A company as huge as Twitter selling this as a subscription seems ridiculous to me. I don't use Twitter much, but IIRC aren't there a bunch of third party apps that have power user features like this already?
- Revue (email newsletter service similar to Substack)
- Scroll (subscription that shares revenue with news sites, and removes ads on said sites)
I highly doubt Twitter Blue will solely get you different app/icon colors, they're likely to roll those services into Blue.
This is somewhat similar to the Amazon Prime approach, where you pay for a premium version of a site/service, and get access to a portfolio of services like Prime Video, Music, 2 day shipping, etc.
Their aim seems to be "Twitter Blue is to consumption of online news as Amazon Prime is to shopping/media".
The way I see it, a subscription model = moving away from a system that incentivizes a platform to maximize engagement/ad views, and instead incentivizes the platform to provide a positive experience, so users stay subscribed.
Didn't Valve make millions from hats[1] in TF2? Selling cosmetic items is way more egalitarian and less "pay-to-win". Would you want Twitter to charge $3 a month for an edit button?
1. Hats and other cosmetic changes to weapons, with no buff.
Those cosmetic items are visible to others in gameplay, so they serve as status symbols.
The features that Twitter is advertising for its premium service all seem to be purely client-side, with the exception of the ‘edit’ button, but that doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling justification for a $3/mo subscription.
To be clear: to my knowledge, Twitter Blue does not include an edit button! I was using it as an example of a "pay-to-win" feature that would burn (free) user's goodwill and is not a good idea in general. The only functional difference I can think of that users will tolerate between free tier and paid tier is probably removing ads
Sadly that is the one thing they are not offering, I would have considered paying for it had they removed ads and promoted tweets etc and I am very infrequent user.
Don't know if you meant it, but "knob", short for "knobhead", is offensive slang in UK. It's eerily fitting here, though (the idea that Twitter leadership might see their users as a bunch of idiots might... not be entirely false).
With the old 3rd party clients I enjoyed using a linear timeline with a synced timeline position via Tweet Marker [0]. I would pay for their subscription if they enabled this for their official clients + web app.
The public’s reaction to this should be highly interesting to those who argue that sites should just have subscriptions instead of targeted ads. $3 is half the price of a single print issue of the Sunday New York Times, but already the story seems to be about Twitter creating second class citizens out of free users who can’t be $36-a-year elites.
A signal that you're willing to pay something. The amount here isn't really relevant, and usage goes beyond social signaling.
If it's exposed over the API and someone's logging into my product with that flag set, you could reasonably assume it's not a bot, or at the very least that whoever's botting has paid $3 of their own money.
I love Twitter and use it every day. Unlike many other sites, owned by tech-giants, I have a lot of goodwill for them and think if anyone can prove that social-media users can be paying customers, it's them.
It's just a bummer that Twitter Blue is not removing ads.
I assume they're not going ad-free because they don't want to cannibalise their ad-business. As in: You can't say your ads are so great and helpful and also offer a way to turn them off. That might decrease the value of their ads?
But it's also the reason I'm a bit on the fence here. I want to be part of the message that says: "Yes, I'm willing to pay for you Twitter!" but without removing ads (and frankly with a pretty bad value prop here) it's not an easy sell.
Does it ever make sense to sell the ability to turn off ads?
I imagine the majority of people willing to pay for such an option are power users, the same group that likely generates the bulk of advertising revenues and lives in countries with high CPC.
These services show ads in ways that delay you accessing the content you want, banner ads, while annoying do not have that property and are a harder sell
Google tried something like that called Google Contributor back in 2017. You could basically just put money in an account, and instead of advertisers buying ads for whatever site you were on, it just took that same money from you and gave it to that site. Honestly a pretty elegant system, but I can kind of picture why it wouldn't have worked out.
Was excited to be able to pay to kill ads, and was shocked that that isn't one of the "features". Ever since cutting cable, I refuse to pay for any service that still tried to monetize me further (looking at you, Hulu.)
That's probably how they can hit the $3 price-point though, I'm sure targeted Twitter ads these days bring in a lot more than $3/user/mo.
According to this, Facebook revenue per-user-per-year is about $30, so $2/mo (post-Apple cut) is probably not far off for Twitter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average.... But of course, why replace that revenue when you could double it?
That $30/year figure is likely averaged over the globe, therefore their North American stat is likely quite a bit higher. Given the quality of ads on twitter that I see, I suspect my value to them is much, much lower. Their ad network just seems terrible compared to Facebook so it's surprising they didn't offer a $10/month ad-free version.
you should really get these kind of data straight from the source when you can. stastica is sometimes useful for some hard to get metrics. this is not one.
$3.72 billion (2020 revenue) / 12 = $310 million average monthly revenue
$310 million / 353.1 million (monthly active users) = $0.88 per user per month
Narrowing down to the monetizable daily active users, the users probably make up the vast majority of monetization:
$310 million / 152 million = $2.03 per user per month
Given that those users who are likely to pay for this service are probably even more skewed than that, yeah $3/month seems low. You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.
> You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.
Many years ago I worked for a company that had tens of millions of US subscribers, my job involved modeling their behavior in order to allocate resources at least a week in advance. The law of large numbers is pretty amazing to see play out in front of you like that, where you can clearly see the bright lines between your market segments - fundamentally different kinds of people. I have a feeling that there is only one kind of person who would pay for twitter, which will very likely end up as a flag in a marketing dataset that certain companies would find well worth whatever twitter charges them (or their data-broker). Not unlike Volkswagen, on the eve of a big sales push for beetles, wanting a list of everyone who regularly buys peanut butter and cat litter.
Yeah, which is why serving ads only to people who don't have disposable income (so don't pay for this subscription) makes the ads less valuable.
But that doesn't sound right to me. Not all products and services are targeted at people with disposable income.
I think the truth is just that Twitter is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Why cut off advertising and data harvesting if people are willing to pay you just to change some colors and the app icon?
That's a little unfair, it's a concept, not a public demo. There's apparently only a few people testing it so far. It might have been overlooked or just easier for some reason to inline the normal twitter timeline view, or whatever they call it, and there might not be a dedicated premium adfree view yet.
Surely they'll reduce ads for the public when paid users en masse have access to this.
The only thing I want to pay for is ad removal. I’d pay $10/month for Twitter without ads in a second. I already pay for YouTube premium, and while I wish they removed tracking in addition to the ads - it’s still great.
When I saw Twitter was launching a paid subscription then I figured it would probably be ad-free (like with YouTube Premium, Twitch Turbo, etc.). Odd that it isn't. It's a dealbreaker for me.
This is awesome. Not because I like Twitter. It’s pretty awful.
And I don’t hold out much hope that this will do anything to stop Twitter from boosting crazy garbage in order to maximize “engagement” and sell ads.
I’m excited because I think this will make it easier for competitors to come along and offer a better, more user-focused experience. You can do a lot with $3/user.
Speaking of awful: Something Awful is an example of a paid social club that flourished. It can work. Twitter is a bit large and comes with certain connotations of low-brow behavior (ie the very essence of only using 160 characters to convey a thought), so I'm not confident it will succeed. It'll be interesting to watch what comes out of the paywall though.
I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently.
It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.
I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed.
The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic.
I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals.
And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives.
> The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow
Twitter is incentivized to introduce engagement-generating garbage into your feed whether you want it or not. You'll be fighting a never-ending battle.
Twitter's default view is an algorithmic timeline which in addition to being ordered randomly (you can't easily tell whether you've reached the end, thus spend more time on it and more opportunities to see ads - I believe this was the original reason why all social platforms switched to this model), it will also include tweets from people you don't follow.
You can opt-out and go back to the chronological feed (not sure if that also includes tweets from people you don't follow) but the setting "accidentally" resets every so often.
"Engagement" also goes beyond ads that you see. If you "engage", despite not seeing ads yourself, you're still contributing to their DAU/MAU metrics and creating content that others might engage with and they might see ads.
Twitter needs to move from an ad model to a subscription model, with subscription fees for accounts of a certain size. The platform would still be free for the majority of users, but accounts over 200K followers (or even 50K followers) should pay for the audience that Twitter provides them with. This would lead to better financial results because recurring revenue is reliable, profitable, and earns a higher multiple than transaction revenue.
I'm all for big companies having to pay for their social media presence. And a lot. That might make them host it themselves and I wouldn't need to look at their offerings on these horrible social mediums...
I hope Mozilla is watching closely. If (and it's a big 'if') this proves successful, it's an important datapoint on the viability of paid-for utility services on the web.
No, Firefox isn't the same thing as Twitter. But if large numbers of people show willingness to pay $2.99/mo to change the app's theme, surely there's enough privacy-conscious people that would pay similarly for a browser that was commercially incentivised to protect privacy rather than monetise it.
I would happily pay a couple bucks per month for a Firefox Pro that’s exactly the same as normal Firefox.
Provided, of course that it’s easy to start and end the subscription, and I don’t have to create a new account. Fortunately Apple provides all of this with the App Store.
A) I don't want to create yet another account and give my CC number to yet another entity who can lose it
B) I guess I don't fully trust them to use the $$ for anything that I care about. Tying the revenue more directly to Firefox IMO would send a stronger signal that this is what matters.
Because he's lying. He would not pay for Firefox Premium. The set of people who would pay for this product is vastly smaller than the set of people who say they would.
I paid for Omniweb and I still miss it. Features included per site settings, and workspaces that worked like a mix of profiles and Apple’s Spaces. It was killed off by free competitors, look where that brought us.
Donations don't go to the browser's development. They go to the Mozilla "Foundation" which works on projects which you may or may not agree with, but the browser isn't one of those.
As far as I know it's impossible to donate towards the browser's development.
I would pay even more to never again see "recommended" tweets from people I don't follow. I use Twitter sort of like RSS, insofar as I want to be able to see everything the people I follow tweet. It amazes me that its not possible to coerce Twitter to do this in the settings. Instead I have to view users individually to see what they've tweeted since I last checked the app.
I've noticed that other platforms like Facebook have been doing something similar. (not that I use Facebook much at all). It used to be a feed of things I've chosen... now half of it is stuff from meme pages, businesses, and animal rescue videos I've never shown any interest in. If I remove one of them, it just finds some other bullshit to push in front of me.
It's like a subtle admission that these platforms are on their way out and they're throwing their own Barnum & Bailey circus just to keep anyone around.
On some platforms, custom streams or lists can be used.
On the late little-lamented Google+, a set of features converged to give this option:
- It was possible to define what profiles could comment on one's own posts, or whose notifications would be visible. I simply piled all my contacts into two lists ("Circles") called "notifications" and "comments". If someone abused that privilege, they were removed.
- The default Home stream could include "featured" or "recommended" content. Individual lists could not. Obvious hack: don't look at the Home stream, and instead have a primary list. On desktop, I further hacked the CSS to remove any references to streams I wasn't interested in following, e.g., the short-lived "Games" category, and "What's Hot" (an absolute cesspit of anodyne irrelevance).
- On successor platforms, I typically set up about three lists in order of priority, often literally "A", "B", and "C". The highest-quality (and lowest-volume) posters go in A, spillover to B, and especially annoying / high-volume to C. If a profile's contributions are not useful, they're unfollowed.
- Mastodon has the additional feature of being able to block an entire instance. For large instances (tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts) this may be overkill. For smaller ones with hostile cultures, it's quite handy.
I'll note: HN has none of these features, but it has excellent moderation, and the option of collapsing annoying threads. If I find myself conversing with someone to whom my meagre skills in communication seem utterly inadequate, I collapse the thread and move on. HN preserves those collapsed states (at times this is an antifeature, here, it's useful).
This isn't quite as powerful as the block-user feature, but in the context of HN's other controls, it's generally sufficient.
This masterpiece of user respect actually reverts periodically to the original, default, "shit up my timeline with likes of my follows from people i don't follow" mode that benefits twitter at your expense, even after you've set it to "don't do that" multiple times.
That, along with the fact that Twitter now censors its search results, are the main reasons I stopped donating content to the platform and deleted my account after 12 years.
I just looked at it again, and it's still on chronological, even though I haven't touched it in months (I usually read Twitter through tweetdeck). I'm actually surprised.
But you're right in that the changing-back behaviour was there some months ago. I don't know if they gave up this user-hostile behaviour or if they segment the user base in several groups and I'm lucky.
I just use regular rss. thankfully there is still some content out there which uses rss. I like the fact that anyone can put uo their own rss feed with whatever they want without needing to be "curated" or "evaluated against terms of service" of some central system
* No suggested tweets, no people I might be interested in, no tweets someone I follow liked - just show me the people I follow and things they explicitly retweet
* The timeline preserves order
* Threads are grouped together and the entire thread is shown
Same here, with such an offering I'd find a subscription attractive. But then again I'd also be more willing to subscribe in general if Twitter didn't try to sabotage my experience and timeline at every step already in the first place.
Exactly. Been using Tweetbot for years (a decade?). Never seen ads. Timeline is literally a “time line”. And nothing shows up that I don’t want to see like promoted tweets, tweets from people I don’t follow, or trends.
Even has some awesome features on top of that like muting (people or hashtags). They’re only limited by Twitter’s throttled API at this point. However, literally the day that Twitter opened up viewing tweet likes via the API, Tweetbot had updated their app to support it.
They switched to a subscription model with Tweetbot 6. And while I’m generally not a fan of subscriptions, I figured $6 per YEAR for an app that I use every day and have for nearly a decade is totally worth it to support the devs.
I once wrote about how you can achieve something similar with uBlock Origin: https://schleiss.io/fixing-twitter-design-with-extension The post was from 2018 so I don't know if the css classes are still valid, also I messed up the images after an update, but I hope you get the gist.
743 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadEdit: also quick undo. So they are monetizing the lack of basic features and their restrictions on clients. I don't really like the idea.
At the moment I‘am quiet happy using Tweetbot but most 3rd party clients are hampered due to API restrictions on Twitters side.
even on official clients, it's always chronological and no ads -- but it's not perfect.
Tweetbot has had mute longer than Twitter has, and some, um, acquaintances I follow I've had muted for years. And I mute keywords if something is getting way too much play, like the electric F-150.
Will I pay Twitter $3/month? Sure, since I'd like to pay for what I use, just like I subscribe to the latest Tweetbot client. Will I use the Twitter client to get the benefits of Twitter Blue? Probably not.
Twitter threads must die, they are an oxymoron and a fugly hack. Just bloody give people a "gist.twitter.io" for long form, or something like that, for goodness' sake.
1. Discoverability and engagement.
2. A tweet thread tends to be more conversational than a blog post and therefore can be more off the cuff (and therefore easier).
I can't think of a reason why any one is going to pay for this ? If they at least marked users as "Blue" like verified perhaps the social status would drive sales, right now there doesn't seem to be any incentive all.
[0] https://twitter.com/i/display
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button
An analog might be game publisher King (maker of Candy Crush Saga) initiating legal proceedings against makers of other games that used the word "Saga" or "Candy", e.g. "Banner Saga"[1], even though those are obviously not reasonable claims -- and I think they lost? Regardless, they're still able to try, and it exerted pressure.
So, imagine you're sitting in a board room at Twitter, naming your new social web app product, and someone says, "How about 'Twitter+'?", and you know there's Disney+, and Apple TV+, and Google+ all already out there, and you say, "nah... that sounds like a headache we can do without." But maybe not, hence why I noted I was merely wondering.
1 - https://metro.co.uk/2014/01/22/candy-crush-makers-sue-the-ba...
If you're really cheap you can signup through their indian link for a couple of dollars a month.
I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now.
What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
So it was rare that they would be made to fight to the death.
Now, slaughtering prisoners in the arena happened just like you are imagining.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator
If your service's business strategy is "1) acquire hundreds of millions of users and charge them all $0.00 per year for many years, 2) acquire lots of expensive infrastructure and employees to support the service, 3) ???, 4) profit", it's not going to be easy.
Yeah, this is the kicker. I think SO's primary intended audience is people clicking Google search results.
If I'm Googling something technical and I see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange results, I always click those first, because I know I'm almost always going to attain the most helpful-information-per-unit-time that way. Even if an answer's many years old, it's usually going to be more helpful than most of the much more recent links, which are often just cookie cutter blogspam.
But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.
I only go to the public one a few times a day now, compared to being wired to it as a beginner :D
I don't think just selling ads is sufficient; especially if it's not a service you can operate at a relatively low cost with a skeleton crew. I think it's probably either that or start charging for something. (Unless your goal isn't to ever make a profit, I suppose.)
Discord seemed to make it work (I think?) by combining an initial semi-skeleton crew approach with a freemium charging approach. They tried a few other things, but I think those efforts flopped.
Discord... definitely different. It's hard for me to believe that Nitro really can be paying for Discord but I guess it's possible?
1 million users * $10/month/user * 12 months/year = $120 million/year
That is close to the cited $130m annual revenue.
I don't know if it's primarily the format, or the different type of user compared to FB, but FB is the winner hands down.
I think it's plausible Jack Dorsey maybe genuinely just didn't want to sign that deal with the devil. I know I wouldn't want to if I made Twitter. (I have no idea if that's what happened, of course. Maybe he wanted to but couldn't find a good way to achieve it.)
I deleted my Twitter last year and I don't miss it.
Create lists of people (just one if you want the main feed-like experience, several if you want some order and structure). Only look at those lists.
They are chronological, and without the random "suggestions" Twitter likes to put before you.
And then you may come to like tweetdeck.twitter.com, where you can see all those lists side by side, and even have sensible keyboard shortcuts.
(Unfortunately, Tweetdeck may become a paid feature, there have been rumors bout it for quite some time)
Hopefully this makes it easier for them to support themselves.
I've long accepted no one cares about how I live my life. A friend of mine spends a ton of their good energy getting upset over the latest 'take' some influencer has. It's like getting upset over an episode of WWE Raw. In any case very very little of what other people do or believe has any direct affect on you.
The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.
I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to understand why you are right, despite all your trying to teach them.
But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing.
I cannot imagine what must’ve gone wrong in their lives that so many lies could be built on one another.
I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly.
Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong.
My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms.
Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
Plus at some point some people can't be redeemed except for truly massive efforts no one will make.
Only because we're effectively alone in the responsibility.
Hint: lack of research isn't limited to Twitter, folks. It's in your pub, your break room, etc
Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness.
The book The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew comes to mind.
I wonder if that's ever happened in the history of humanity. I have my doubts.
- Genuine hippie communes (Do kibbutzes count?)
- Amish
- Indigenous tribes where elders are respected
- Rural/suburban Minnesotans because they tend towards hardy dealing with life and climate struggles and unimpressed by immodesty
- In the old days (80's/90's), my grandparents knew most of their neighbors, grocery store cashiers, butcher, hair stylist, and a number of other people well. What ever happened to that? I don't even know any of the neighbors in my apartment complex despite introducing myself, and one (Louis Vuitton-strutting cliché) woman neighbor next door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries in passing. WTH.
All of this makes educating people in venues like Twitter (and some of these exist outside of the online world) a very difficult prospect.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244
I gave up and blew up all of my "social" media because they didn't serve any purpose.
Maybe an invite-only platform could have higher signal with:
- multiple "vouches" of others to get an invitation
- frequency/reputation micropayment cost to post
- reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased, and granted some with the invite
- elimination of pile-on
- multifaceted voting based on specific aspects of relevance, agreement, and insight
- humor voted/tagged and filtered by readers to avoid using dv for that
- dv has moderator-visible reasoning to double-check and prevent spurious dv
- prevention of dv retribution
- reduced anonymity (first name and picture) for higher-quality interactions
- mediation and de-escalation facilities such as pre-comment emotional content scanning (AI-based sarcasm detection would rock), posting delay of 2 hours, and side chats
- login required to view content, no search engine spidering
- operate as a sustainable nonprofit to avoid pressures of corporate profiteering
- servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.
Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size.
When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me.
Curated content wins.
Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.
We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.
I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence.
The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that.
We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.
Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK).
On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness.
Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.
I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.
HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility.
Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts.
There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this).
[1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875
If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats.
You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them.
I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.
The political differences here are often stark. You also have a fair amount of Independents here which makes this place a bit more tolerable for me. I really can't stand left-wing or right-wing ideologues, much less the extremists.
HN caters to people from all across the US (most of the audience is outside Silicon Valley and the global audience continues to grow based on dangs postings).
You could say it's mostly male, but I've seen more usernames with women's names in them.
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party, and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently - and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.
― Gore Vidal
Maybe it's me, but I don't think about participants' gender or if there's enough/too much of any particular attribute group. I infer your point is that HN extends well-beyond the stereotypical academic, software engineer, or tech entrepreneur: male, Caucasian/Asian/Indian subcontinental, high-income or college student, SF to Milpitas.
The rest of this is pretty spot on, and your assessment of my sentiment was spot on.
Property for me, not for thee...
It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts!
No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.
It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place.
HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned.
HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
And on twitter I see little outrage and disinformation. Our experiences are so far apart on social media that I'm not sure anecdotes will do much for the conversation here.
Can you point to some example topics I should keep an eye out for?
That's probably because you don't post any opinions that the HN hivemind finds controversial. Stray outside the lines just a bit and expect moderator censure and downvotes/flags.
Sometimes I end up softening or changing someone's position on something, sometimes I soften or change mine or learn a lot of new things, and I have to imagine that happens with some lurkers as well, and I'm not sure what more I could hope for, besides wishing it was easier sometimes.
Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-Reddits (/r/atheism cough cough) delete links to scientific evidence showing AA efficacy: https://archive.is/gEXfA Why let facts get in the way of a good social networking rage fest?
Twitter is the opposite. The most inflammatory comments trigger the most engagement, and so get the most visibility.
> In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense
I don't see this happening on HN. The shallow nonsense isn't the problem, it's the hateful opinions and "carefully reasoned, smart sounding" racism that is the problem. Calling it shallow nonsense makes it sound like no big deal or low effort hate posts. But that's not what I'm talking about.
People say the worst things here but they use a large vocabulary and so it seems to get a pass. The hate here is very similar to the hate I see elsewhere and often it is much much worse here than on Twitter, in my personal experience.
Can you give an example of a thread that turned out that way? I'm genuinely curious if I've been missing something, or if I've just managed to steer clear of topics that end up like that.
$5 words instead of plain speak is an accessibility problem but anti-intellectualism never solved anything. Maybe inferiority feelings or catastrophizing? Do what I do, subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. :) Go through the GRE prep materials if you want a bigger vocab. Heck, I would get a used unabridged dictionary and make it a point to work from cover-to-cover. Watch those obnubilated smarty-pants shudder in fear. :)
PS: Your usage of “smart racism,” “nazis,” “homophobes” etc are strong bayesian evidence (to me) that you’re just looking to guilt-trip people and victimize yourself. The only kind of racism I have seen on HN is the kind I see literally everywhere: people don’t really care about people not in their bubbles. This is better named selfishness than racism, and it’s inherent in human nature. (If you’re curious, I am middle-eastern, and not exactly binary myself; I have been abused when I was younger for being “transgenderish.” Which kind of forced me to adopt more conforming, binary social masks.)
I've also seen anti-religious sentiments and anti-chinese nationalism popping up pretty proeminintely every now and again. Climate change denial is also rarely missing from any longer conversation about climate.
Edit: Here's an example that eventually got flagged, but sparked a long conversation that had a few supporters as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26990070
I'm not sure what you'd like to see changed in this case?
Ideally, when someone claims that they can tell how smart someone is from how they look, that should be downvoted to oblivion and receive overwhelming counter-evidence or no attention at all.
Of course, what happened was quite OK, and much better than many other corners of the internet. But still, it's proof that that there is some explicit racism on HN, not just people not caring about others.
What does this have to do with doing something about the Iranian regime or Chinese regime or any other regime? I barely even discussed homophobia.
And note that you can be anti-fundamentalist without being anti religion, and you can be against the Chinese regime without being anti Chinese people (just like you can be anti Israel without being antisemitic).
It isn't inherently social media or democracy that's the problem, it's the incentives behind it.
/s
Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!
I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.
I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can’t imagine how it’s all kept in check here.
How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.
If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.
Twitter is pretty close to that, except it’s default opt-in rather than default opt-out. Meaning everyone can see your content by default, rather than you having to explicitly allow rando’s to see your content and reply to you.
But if you follow people who make high-quality posts, and unfollow, mute, and/or block people who produce all noise and no signal, you’ll have a pretty good professional and personal networking experience.
Most other social media have ways of curating your feed, but you have to proactively do it, can’t just rely on the social media platform to do it for you.
Personal details don't deter it, as shown by the various platforms that were inhabited by the alt-right. There's a cultural lack of responsibility for the truth.
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-rela...
I'm thinking of some kind of ML scheme where the site analyzes your comment and sees if it is similar enough to existing comments.
Or perhaps also analyzes your comments to see if they are similar to older comments you have made already.
Why do you think this is a good thing?
> - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
I see two ways that could go: either somewhere that China and/or Russia have control over, or in an unstable third-world dictatorship. Do you have any specific countries where none of the above would apply, or do you prefer one of the latter two to the US and EU?
Somewhere like Iceland or Greenland.
The root cause is that platforms like Twitter rely on engagement (and maybe more importantly, growth of said engagement) for their lifeblood.
When that's the case, the incentive will always be to increase engagement at all costs and nothing drives engagement like flamewars and other lowest common denominator garbage.
Additionally, as long as the social currency is "how much other members of the userbase like your posts" you'll wind up with either a single hivemind or multiple warring factions IMO (e.g. conservatives vs. liberals on FB)
HN manages to keep its discourse level fairly high because of this, I believe. HN does not need to grow nor generate revenue directly. A Twitter-alike, curated as strictly as HN, might work. It might even be able to turn a profit, if the goal was sustainable profit and not some impossible dream of unbounded growth concocted by investors wanting the next trillion-dollar hit.
Many social media platforms have tried this and failed Even at the lowest level of having to get an invite from someone you know - its never worked:
- Clubhouse - Google+ - ELLO - Mastodon
The paradox here is you need people to generate sustainable communities. When you don't have enough people, users will stop using the platform. Another classic case of this is all the "decentralized" social platforms like Diaspora and others. Great idea, great implementation, but without enough people, its doomed to fail.
That said, the exception is a network created for an extant community. In fact, most of the major successful social media networks have emerged from just such a community, and quite frequently one that's academically oriented.
Email, Usenet, and Facebook all emerged out of academia. Email and Usenet with early Arpanet and major research universities. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Several other early networks such as The WELL and Slashdot were strongly adjacent to these.
Several early BBS systems emerged out of or alongside military service communities. I don't recall if it was AOL, Prodigy, or another early network which was strongly popular among US military personnel and families (a large, reasonably cohesive community, widely distributed, with contacts and ongoing communications in distant locations).
YC's HN would be another example.
But generally, creating an early cohesive community is a challenge, and many of the tricks for short-cutting this process tend also to greatly diminish the long-term value and prospects of the discussion platform.
My own contention is that Google+ actually did have a strong internal-to-the-network (not just Google) community (though one that excluded a great many people). I feel the social network hurt itself by trying to open too quickly (Ello certainly did), as well as by Google's own greatly bifurcated affinity groups: technologists on the one hand, and marketers on the other. Marketing/advertising is toxic to social cohesion, and this showed early in G+ evolution.
The more I think about those problems the more I'm convinced up- and downvotes are a mistake in general. They can only cause damage and are completely useless as they're not even used for the same thing by different people. For example when someone gets 5 downvotes it's probably for at least 2 different reasons, none of which are communicated to the poster. When I get a random downvote I'd really like to know if it was warranted, but there's no way to find out.
If any kind of rating system had to exist I'd vote for something like tags; with users being able to tag any content with any 1-2 words, and frequent ones are visible without some extra clicks. For one this would give more nuanced information, and at the same time it would make tons of content much easier to find or filter.
- Popularity itself is a very poor metric for quality. It's mostly a metric for ... popularity. Which is to say: broad appeal, simplicity, emotive appeal (or engagement), and brevity. This does however correspond reasonably well to sales and advertising metrics.
- The most critical question the designer of a moderation / rating system needs to ponder is what is the goal? See https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
- My own goal tends toward maximised overall quality, with a high favouring of truth value and relevance.
- There's some value to a multi-point rating scale. This is called a "Likert Scale", typically an odd-number of points (3, 5, 7, ...), most commonly encountered as a star-scale system. Amazon and Uber are the most familiar of these today, and highlight failure modes. If users' ratings are rebalanced based on their own average rating, at least some of the issues go away (e.g, a very positive rater giving away 5/5 will have those ratings discounted, a conservative rater offering 3/5 on average would see those uprated). The adjusted average becomes the rebalanced rating.
- Note that a capped cumulative score is not the same as an averaged Likert score. Slashdot's moderating system is an example of the former. It ... kind of works but mostly doesn't. Highly-ranked content tends to be good, but much content deserving higher ratings is utterly ignored.
- Taking number of interactions and applying a logarithmic function tends to give a renormalised popularity score. That is, on a log-log basis, you'll tend to see a linear scaling from "1 person liked this" to "10 billion people liked this" (roughly the range of any current global-scale ratings system). See also: Power Distribution, Zipf Function.
- Unbiased and uncorrupted expertise should rate more strongly. In averaging the inputs of 300 passengers + 2 pilots for an airplane's flight controls, my preferred weighting is roughly 3300*0 and 11. Truth or competence are not popularity games.
- Sometimes a distinct "experts" vs. "everyone" scoring is useful. I've recently seen an argument that film reviews accomplish this, with the expert reviewers' scores setting expectations for "what kind of film is this" and the popular rating for "how well did this film meet established expectations"? There are very good bad films, and very bad good films, as well as very bad bad films.
- "The wisdom of crowds" starts failing rapidly where the crowd is motivated, gamed, bought, or otherwise influenced. Such behaviour must* be severely addressed if overall trust in a ratings system is to remain.
- Areas of excellence ("funny", "informative", "interesting", etc.) are somewhat useful but very often the cost of acquiring that information is excessively high. Indirect measures of attributes may be more useful, and there's some research in this area (Microsoft conducted studies on classification of Usenet threads based on their "shape", in the 2000s. Simply based on the structure of reply chains, there were useful classifications: "dead post", "troll", "flameware", "simple question everybody can answer", "hard question many can guess at but one expert knows the answer", etc.
- Actual engagement with content, even just for a voting or other action is a small fraction of total views. Encouraging more rating behaviour often backfires. Make do with the data that occurs naturally, incentivised contribution skews results.<...
It would be lovely to have a platform/forum where the whole concept was just that the moderation would ban people not only for spreading misinformation or making ad-hominem attacks, but also for applying unsound logic / not citing sources when asked / etc. All the same stuff that'd get a journal paper rejected during peer-review.
(With public records of moderator decisions, and the ability to appeal a decision; but where the "appeals process" just translates to your post going through a Slashdot-like "bunch of regular users given temporary moderation duties approve/deny your post" — which, given the type of user who'd want to be on a platform like this, likely wouldn't be any more friendly to your post than the mods would be.)
It'd sure be a niche platform, but that'd match well with how much work the moderation staff would have to do to keep up with discussion on it. I'd pay to be there!
(Yes, this is what scientific journals were originally supposed to be: heavily-moderated public forums for conversation between scientists. They don't serve this function well any more, as they've been parasitized by the function of serving the needs of academic clout-seekers.)
I work in biotech, and lets pretend I'm an expert on a topic- say immunology. When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? No amount of money is going to persuade me - but that's just me ofcource.
Turn it around. Make it like Reddit's /new: have moderators able to sift through countless posts about misinformation and approve the good ones. It's not a large difference in what moderators end up doing — they still have to at least skim over all the misinformation. But it's psychologically very different — you can just "walk away" from annoying things that stink of quackery up-front, while "engaging with" only the things that seem good, and eventually "upvoting" the things that still seem good even after you've read them carefully.
Yes, I'm actually suggesting that every post on such a site would go through a moderation queue. (Just one that any user can dip into to look at, if they like, but only moderators can actually vote on.) Or, if not every post, then a good sampling of them; or maybe every post from users with less than N approved posts.
The big effect of that would be that there wouldn't be "countless posts about misinformation." There'd be a couple, mostly by new users with clear signal of that user just being an attacker to the community who doesn't actually want to become part of it (and therefore, can just be banned wholesale.) Noise would drop over time, because crackpots wouldn't even get a short blip of engagement. They'd get none. Their account would die in the crib, never witnessed by anyone but moderators and curious /new viewers.
Combine it with a KYC mechanism (so users can't keep making new accounts) and the moderation load actually becomes reasonable.
That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith - they're not bad-actors looking to attack the community.
Those are just my thoughts, but what do I know, I'm not an expert on these topics :)
The moderators would never be expected to audit "posts" (top-level links to big things that need a long analysis process), just comments.
Or rather — "posts" can be, in some sense, raw evidence/data, not assertions about anything in particular. (Think e.g. a link to a scientific study. Nobody assumes that the poster of such a link is asserting, through the link, that they believe the study's own conclusions to be true — just that they believe the study to be interesting in some way — worth discussing.)
Moderators would be expected to poke their head into a post link for just long-enough to confirm that it's that "artifact to be interpreted" kind of post. If it is, it's allowed to stand.
Whereas "comments" — those that are part of a post alongside the link, or those in reply/reference to a post — are almost always the conclusions drawn from the data, editorialization by the participant user(s). Those are what need moderating.
If you prune only the bad comments, then bad posts no longer matter, because their engagement (which is univerally in the form of bad comments) disappears, and so the post itself is no longer "interesting" according to any kind of social recommendation system.
("Posts" can also be external-to-the-platform editorializations/opinion pieces. I would suggest just banning this type of content altogether. Moderator notices an external link is to an opinion piece? Out it goes. If you want to talk about some externally-written Op/Ed in the forum, you'd have to "import" it into the forum in full text — at which point it would be subject to moderation, and would also be the karmic responsibility of whoever chose to "import" it. You'd be claiming the words of the Op/Ed as your words. Like reading something into evidence in a court room — if it turns out to be faked evidence, that's libel on the part of whichever party introduced it.)
> are good at moderating the posts across various fields
I see what I think you're imagining here, but I never meant to imply that moderators are required to actually verify that statements are true (which requires domain knowledge), only to verify on a syntactic level that the poster is engaging in valid logic to derive conclusions from evidence via syllogisms/induction/etc. (which only requires an understanding of epistemics and rhetoric.) Basically, as long as the poster seems to be behaving in good faith, they're fine. It's up to the userbase themselves to notice whether the logic is sound — built on true assumptions.
In other words, the point of the moderators is to catch the same types of things a judge will notice and subtract points for in a debating society. But instead of points, your post just never shows up because it wasn't approved; and you edge closer to being banned.
> That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith
I mean, that's the main thing I'd want to stop in its tracks: repeating things without first fact-checking them. Yes, preventing people from parroting things they've "heard somewhere" without citing an independent source, would kill 99% of potential discourse on such a platform. Well, good! What'd be left is the gold I want out of the platform in the first place: primary-source posters who can cite their own externally-verifiable data; secondary-source investigative-journalists who will find and cit...
Someone must have dug and learned something, for everyone else to blindly follow.
Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills. I'm not surprised your effort failed, I'm sure if you offered to teach me critical thinking skills I'd wonder who the heck you thought you were.
Frankly your confidence in your own impeccable critical thinking skills cast doubts. The smartest people are those who know they can be deceived. If you don't have the humility to check your own reasoning then you are probably wrong about something.
If an anonymous stranger comes to me with "Let me tell you that how you think is wrong" - yea, I don't think I'm going to buy that.
(Not that this is ever successful in places like Twitter.)
It is still a matter of trust. Approach me with respect and I'll consider your POF. Approach me with "Your reasoning process is flawed beyond your understanding" and really - who the heck are you? In the anonymity of the internet you could be anyone.
You see this a lot on Hacker News too, like when the discussion touches anything related to moderation, community standards/guidelines, censorship, fact-checking, etc. A particularly popular viewpoint around here seems to be that the government (or sometimes, any powerful corporation) cannot possibly be allowed to be involved in determining the validity of any claim, particularly if that claim is controversial, i.e. there are prominent people on both sides who appear to feel strongly about the claim.
This point cannot be emphasized enough. I have encountered people on the opposing side of an issue who have stronger critical thinking skills than people who I agree with (and probably even myself). The differences come about due to a differences in the foundations of our knowledge or on pivotal points where neither side can claim to have an definitive answer.
If one person's POV is that <institution> should help while the other person's is that <institution> can only hurt, then they are never going to agree no matter how many links and memes and snarky comebacks they throw at each other.
Critical thinking is a skill that is almost useless to most people and can lead to being a net negative. It's the skill of critique. One can be amazing at critical thinking and be absurdly terrible at constructive thinking. Politics in general needs far less critique and far more construction. It's really bad to get people very aware of just how badly they're exploited but then to give them no potential solutions to solve it. That's basically what wokism has done recently. Every solution proposed by them is so unpalatable to the rest of the nation that there is no place for constructing new policies.
The left has this problem especially bad since the radical left makes being really good at critique a whole component of their intellectual tradition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
It's not even about critical thinking skills. The 'other side' is often starting with a completely different set of facts. The only difference being which ones were highlighted and which were omitted.
This doesn't even touch on straight up falsities yet.
Until the sides can agree on some base first principles, it's going to be a hard problem to solve.
I also said it was a fools errand - something that had little chance of succeeding against the waves of misinformation on Twitter. And finally, you’re right that knowing you can be wrong and challenging your own beliefs is fundamental to critical thinking.
The whole thing is philosophically weird, but practically speaking, one can somewhat know that people saying aliens built the pyramids are the ones lacking critical thinking. For example, I don’t think people promoting the cancel culture lack critical thinking, even though I’d bet on it being a long-term disaster. But most anti-vaccers are pretty obviously lacking some critical thinking skills.
It’s generally the ability to tell your political interests apart from your epistemic knowledge. In simpler terms, the ability to engage less in wishful thinking. While perfection is impossible, I do think it’s possible to improve in this ability. Proving it to others is another challenge; You probably need to predict counterintuitive results consistently for people to somewhat trust in you.
"Never read the comments" is common advice for a reason, and it has nothing to do specifically with Twitter.
It's better to follow creative people. They tend to have much more interesting things to say. Follow people like John Carmack, Simone Giertz, or The Onion instead.
My Twitter experience isn't nearly as good as it was some years ago, to be sure, but I follow fairly few people outside the "friends of friends" perimeter and rarely follow people who are given to performative outrage, even if they are people I generally agree with. While I do block people occasionally, I'm more free with "mute temporarily", "mute forever" and, importantly, "turn off retweets" -- that can have an almost magically cleansing effect on your timeline.
I very much find the Twitter experience is what you make of it. I did it wrong the first time I tried twitter, and I hated and abandoned it, too.
Second time around, I started with a handful of tech people that post interesting content or work in projects I'm involved or interested in, and organically grew from there. I also follow a couple people that post local (to my small city) traffic/news/etc. And within the last year, I follow some people that post COVID stuff about my region, who produce charts and stuff that are 10x more useful than the official government sources (eg: updated and realistic R calculations, include charts with hospitalizations/deaths, etc).
What is absolutely not useful is anything political (the replies to COVID stuff tend to get political, so I also ignore that), or pretty much anything in "trending".
Also don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people, and click "Not interested in this -> show fewer retweets/likes from this person" -- all things that have made it tolerable and even useful. If disinformation/lies or other similar nonsense starts getting in my feed, I do what I need to get rid of it. This has meant sometimes unfollowing someone I otherwise like (eg, they're replying that disinformation and causing fights) but honestly, it's just not worth it to me.
By curating my feed, I'm in general happy with it.
Twitter is such a trash, I mean on the IRC at least you can split in groups, kick out and prevent unsignaled readership. On twitter millions can read a random shit without segregation it's awful.
I had to get away from it when the US required foreigners to disclose their twitter accounts upon entry, with all my ISIS "friends"...
As for elected officials, I wish they'd just disable replies altogether for them. Nothing good comes from it.
The irony is, translating to IRL, I apparently discovered I have this semi-employed, "macho" no-shirt neighbor who accused me of being racist for asking if they had an entrance keyfob to prevent tailgating into an access-controlled apartment building. Then they talked about all the (nonexistent) "cameras" around, began recording me (for what, I don't know), using racist slurs, and tried to start a physical fight (they're half my weight, like a yappy chihuahua). I'm wondering if they're schizophrenic and narcissistic, in addition to appearing like a victim-mentality crybully crybaby. My point is perhaps people are taking their online behaviors into the real world.
PS: You should've heard what Latinx gangbangers called me when I was a kid. I never got beaten-up because I was bigger than all of them, but I learned the finer points of swearing in Spanish. :) I understand the tall blade of grass gets clipped so I don't take any of it personally.
It's supposed to be an all-encompassing term for "Laino" and "Latina," but only serves to divide people further. Like almost every other ethnic rebranding of the last ten years.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I kinda suspect the notion of most of these services just being free and not resorting to really unpleasant ad systems and dark patterns and such ... just not viable generally.
However, some of my absolute favorite twitter accounts post a lot. To each their own. I don't have to hit the button.
Too drastic IMO. Some of the best posts I've read on Twitter come in threads, a chain of consecutive tweets by the same author. I would propose instead an option to filter profanity, most of the low value, or plain harmful, tweets use offensive words.
Maybe a warning that your tweet will get a drastically reduced audience for using X or Y words, so the poster can rephrase it before submitting?
Twitter is already profitable today, even without this subscription service.
it's a pity most of twitter seems to be a perpetual shitstorm of low effort brainless buzz
ps: out of the whole internet debasement.. I kinda see something, is that talk has a purpose, if I talk to someone I'd rather have a nice moment, and the ability to debate endlessly with people I don't even (or bots even) is fruitless. a strange kind of lesson on using ones times correctly
Now what you learn is mostly to argue your way around your opinion better, not exactly to change it. But why would you: you change your opinion when looking for insight (reading a book), not when looking for a win (debating on an advertisement platform).
This is why Twitter should be an open protocol, and people should be able to write their own UserAgents. Users should be in control of the filtering, not the app or the company.
ActivityPub is an open protocol for this kind of thing.
I use twitter as an external brain not that dissimilar to a a Xanadu inspired Memex intermixed with a Zettelkasten.
I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.
One recent example, there was a news report that famous short seller Michael Burry had taken a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla. This number came from a basic misreading of Burry’s disclosure, but the news media ran with it and an article with this number showed up on the HN front page. If you followed the right people on Twitter you knew the number was wrong within minutes, while the news media has still not issued a correction. This situation happens all the time.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-...
https://twitter.com/Keubiko/status/1394351225316028420?s=20
Only if you are looking for deep thoughtful comments. Twitter need not be that place. It could be a place to amplify the voices of the oppressed some of which may sound like noise. This kind of voice has never been available through mainstream media like cable or T.V.
Mostly kidding, but, well sadly it isn't a joke.
There is a good reason they hid the tweet count, because most of the biggest names on twitter actually have Tweet counts that if you divide them by hours since their join date it would be as high as 0.8 to 1.2 tweets an hour every hour 24 hours a day for 11 years+
Once you learn this it puts those users in a very different perspective and they no longer seem like people you should be listening to.
That's most "engagement" on the internet, lol. Twitter is bad but it's not like all the other social media platforms are that much better. It's just how some people behave socially (anonymous or not, it doesn't seem to matter), at least when they're not meaningfully focusing on some worthwhile goal or pursuit like most of us are here @ HN. And trying to stop it with heavy-handed authoritarian policies only makes it worse as people strive to abuse the policies themselves to troll and gain power over others.
My rule when using it is that I only interract with personal photos/stories, or stuff posted publicly.
I completely ignore postings that are not personal and to friend only (not public). Facebook has (or had?) huge potential for people to keep in touch but its bigger issue are private gardens where people can spin up opinions into silliness with no opportunity for anybody from outside their echo chamber to criticize and debunk.
LMAO you're absolutely right! source: me
I personally believe that most of this toxicity is induced. I don’t think most humans are toxic by nature.
Can you blame victims of war for their tireless online activism? So what that they turn toxic, can you blame them when they are continuously facing mis/dis-information on a topic they are experiencing first hand? Yet this group can appear as toxic as any on Twitter.
We can criticize but not to the point of unilaterally dismissing these groups as if they are equal. A climate-change denier is not equal to a Gazan teen “journalist but only through tweets”. Both may annoy you with their “perpetual beef” but it’s not really fair to abandon the one good thing this platform has done - give people a voice. We need to just learn to deal with it.
I’m not sure what the impact of this will be, but I hope it won’t be the undermining of grass-roots activism. Even if that activism can border on toxic.
Heh funny I had the exact inverse assumption: that maybe they realized single-minded attempts to monetize only engagement exacerbates toxic human behaviour.
I'm thinking the truth is probably somewhere between both.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
+1 on this thinking! But more vibing with the idea of imposed scarcity, rather that the hyper-customized view of the world.
Related: I personally feel that more elements of consensus reality should play a role in our digital spaces, not each getting our own view just because we can have it. Just because we can fine-tune our reality to our preferences, that doesn't mean that's good for a system for its actors to do so highly. Imho there's a reason human minds generally all evolved to be mostly on the same page in terms of perceived reality (except for a few subtle knobs on some generally minor axes). And the neurotypes that break theses consensus reality rules are generally perceived as maladapted and tend to be ostracized (e.g. schizophrenia, barring value judgements about their treatment in society). I do believe there's an evolutionary lens to place over that vague shared sensibility (ie. what underlying feature of network dynamics did evolution "learn" and tune into?) and imho this all informs how we might build tech :)
Then again, I curate who I follow pretty closely and I have a long list of political buzzwords suppressed through the "Muted words" feature.
I don't get notifications that contain those words, and tweets that include them don't show in my timeline.
This is self inflicted. My Twitter feed feels like a really big friend group talking/joking about anime, tech, finance, etc. You are quite literally the company you keep on Twitter.
> Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
You won't get far taking the website this serious.
(I should add that I'm black and so are most of the people I follow so it's possible I'm basing this off a group of people that already have some larger sense of community off the bat)
Not totally accurate. I have a highly curated twitter made up of finance and tech yet the suggested trends are HORRIBLE. Wonderful topics such as "Nazis", "RacistSoAndSo", "JimCrow", "UncleTom" etc etc etc.
Its a black hole, pile on of hate. I call it the trending two minutes of hate; and its built in with no way of turning it off.
If I had to guess I’d say it goes off what your following is interacting with/talking about at the moment. I notice they get more negative when my timeline is talking about something more controversial.
Compare this to politics where the end is never in sight and the goal posts are eternally moving.
this isn't quite it, but it's a good way to filter out a lot of trash: https://megablock.xyz/
Ultimately, Twitter is a gossip site, so this should be no real surprise.
And yes, you can configure twitter + using tweetdeck to only see tweets in chronological order and only from people you follow.
It's kind of like a sweet metaphor for the eternal September.
I'm not a huge twitter user (~2-5 mins a day, read-only), but I tend to do this manually. If I notice that an account is taking up the majority of my wall space I tend to unfollow. After iterating a few times I ended up with a decently balanced wall.
Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter.
Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact.
Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package.
The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures). ______
Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man.
Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope.
Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut.
There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find)
_______
Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all.
I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics.
It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through.
It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like
Take the name for example. Any other platform has a clear written or unwritten rule.
- HN: usernames
- LinkedIn: real names
- Twitter: a mix
On Twitter, you clearly lose out if you put your real name out there. You suddenly get trolled by strange avatars hiding their identity and very little community control.
What's strange is facebook. The fact it's more segregated by close circle make the discussion nastier than on linkedin when you have your company name on top of your mean troll.
Do you post on controversial subjects?
What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views. I don't like the idea of banning someone for simply holding a view, or forcing someone to align with an ideology of choice. "Platform X is awful" is actually "People are awful".
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Why not just avoid Twitter ? In any transactional setting you need to give something to get something. Twitter as a commercial entity needs users frequenting their platform and as therefore most comments on any social media platform are low going to be low quality (including HN).
A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? Or a terrorist disguised as a village idiot can do the same? Then sure yes Twitter is a great personification of our current society(ies).
That is not accurate. The reality is the opposite of what you said. The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. People only interact with content/people they agree with and this is causing social media bubbles.
It's based on inflated numbers derived from false information. Tell me this - if you saw two adjacent town square forums and one person had 10 people listening and another one had 100 people listening to them, what are the odds the 111th person goes to listen to one over the other? The 100 people of course. This is effectively how twitter works, but can be gamed by fake "crowds" of bots.
So, yes people are voluntarily listening to those with influence, but the gatherers are given inaccurate information to make that decision. The distinction is important.
If we all agreed that twitter was trash and we all just stop going, then it's over - that village idiot has no power.
I've stopped. Presumably you stopped too. If you are still going, maybe you're the idiot?
Personification != same thing. I think you missed the point.
> That's not possible with sound waves at the town square.
Huh? I can simply not go into the town square.
> If we all agreed that twitter was trash and we all just stop going, then it's over - that village idiot has no power.
Exactly. but there are enough people benefitting from Twitter that they simply don't care that the village idiot has power (or they are the village idiot themselves).
This is a little shallow of a view, as in it is much more complicated than that. At its simplest, sure you can say Twitter is merely an outlet with no interference on the platform itself. But if you actually use it for any period of time or just follow the various ridiculous outrages it produces, you will quickly see that, just as we shape Twitter with our tweets, it itself shapes us and how we articulate ourselves, the level of discourse we expect. To be specific, Twitter favors short, “smoking gun” style arguments, that can be compressed into 240 characters or divided up into those segments for a thread. This necessarily “compresses” discourse into a series of dramatic accusations as evidence. It is not enough to say that someone made a offensive statement years ago. Instead, it becomes that that person themselves is bad or x-ist. This I think is the net negative to society and I doubt we would arrive at quite this point with Twitter’s “help.”
The medium is the message. I firmly believe that the thoughtfulness and value that goes into a communication is directly proportional to its length and indirectly proportional to its age (likely due to survivorship bias). Twitter, occupying the extreme short end of both spectrums, seems to amplify the worst facets of human nature.
Books, especially old books that have remained in print (survivorship bias), seem to have somehow tapped into the better parts of human nature because they represent and stimulate discussion of ideas that have remained relevant across vast shifts in time and space, technology and culture.
The problem we have is that it's difficult to get people to read and especially engage with these old books. Schools have tried this for years with little success. Many (North American) students will gladly tell you how little love they have for Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, 1984, etc. Thoughtfulness and the slow burn of classic literature just don't have the same gratification feedback loop that people get from Twitter, I suppose.
Twitter isn't just a reflection, though, it's a feedback loop. It takes a stream of ideas (usually ill-considered) from a ridiculous number of people and sends them directly to the people that it expects will be most emotionally affected by them. Those people then absorb those ideas and either react with anger or support, feeding the system with new material to repeat the cycle.
If Twitter simply reflected society, it would have done no harm. But instead it's amplified the most animalistic part of our collective nature.
2) a reflection of something bad makes the bad thing more visible and twice as negative
Yes, that could also monetise it so it is only two free post per day and accumulate maximum of 10 before twitter charge them $ per tweet.
And more RSS Reader like features.
I could categorise people into different topics. Today I dont want to see any shit storm on politics, so I wont click on it. I only want to see tech and economics.
Right now moving to list and making them working in harmony with the main feed is a bag of hurt.
you're soooooooo close to getting it, but so far.
monetizing engagement -creates- toxic communities, because toxicity is engaging.
Twitter is a huge space and your experience comes down to what your bubble on Twitter is. The self development/Indie hacker/Tech/Devs/AI/Product/Life Lessons bubble, while still pretentious, at least is way better than the Celebrity/Cancel culture/Outrage bubble.
Makes me wonder how much power these state actors have now that cancel culture is a thing. They can just whip up a mob and character-terror anyone they want, without being detected at all.
PS: I am not even saying these are bots. They can just pay people some meager money to do this. It’s an easy job in a country with very high unemployment. Heck, even Amazon does this in a small scale.
Once it blew up and became toxic AF, I unfollowed everybody, started following only specific people, blogs and sites related to my industry (software development) in order to stay up to date with the goings on around me. That was it, since then, its become another basic news feed.
Kind of sad what its become to be honest.
As long as those suckers and their audience still watch your ads, you can.
EDIT: This mostly only applies to very specific positions (mostly design positions). I'm not insinuating that these companies are literally requiring Twitter. It's a bit more complex than that.
I'm not completely unopposed to Twitter having a subscription offering, but this isn't what I'd want from it at all.
(Number 1 would be unrestricted third party client before. The Twitter product team is awful and the UI basically unusable.)
"We'll charge users $3 a month to change the app colors and icon.".
/s
Sure twitter may not do it client side and have special APIs etc, however ultimately they can also really do only limited time changes, other wise the tweets already read by others would start changing.
Of course they can still pull API access for violating ToS etc, however from technology context there is nothing they can do .
A company as huge as Twitter selling this as a subscription seems ridiculous to me. I don't use Twitter much, but IIRC aren't there a bunch of third party apps that have power user features like this already?
- Revue (email newsletter service similar to Substack)
- Scroll (subscription that shares revenue with news sites, and removes ads on said sites)
I highly doubt Twitter Blue will solely get you different app/icon colors, they're likely to roll those services into Blue.
This is somewhat similar to the Amazon Prime approach, where you pay for a premium version of a site/service, and get access to a portfolio of services like Prime Video, Music, 2 day shipping, etc.
Their aim seems to be "Twitter Blue is to consumption of online news as Amazon Prime is to shopping/media".
The way I see it, a subscription model = moving away from a system that incentivizes a platform to maximize engagement/ad views, and instead incentivizes the platform to provide a positive experience, so users stay subscribed.
1. Hats and other cosmetic changes to weapons, with no buff.
The features that Twitter is advertising for its premium service all seem to be purely client-side, with the exception of the ‘edit’ button, but that doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling justification for a $3/mo subscription.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When they see users they don't see people in need as a service or product.
All they see is a Knob.
-> "Twist the user like this" Are we making more or less money?
-> If yes, turn further to that direction, else turn to the opposite direction.
Modern social media companies are no longer about offering effective social networking & communication services. Its all about the money now.
By "Knob" I meant the kind of that you turn on a radio when tuning toa frequency.
[0] https://tweetmarker.net/
I predict this will be a failure at launch. followed by Twitter Pro which will be damned near exactly what everyone wants.
If anything, I would want it as a social signal rather than the features.
If it's exposed over the API and someone's logging into my product with that flag set, you could reasonably assume it's not a bot, or at the very least that whoever's botting has paid $3 of their own money.
Or at least a medal emoji. Are blue checkmarks so popular that everyone is excited to have two, why is social signal so important for you?
It's just a bummer that Twitter Blue is not removing ads.
I assume they're not going ad-free because they don't want to cannibalise their ad-business. As in: You can't say your ads are so great and helpful and also offer a way to turn them off. That might decrease the value of their ads?
But it's also the reason I'm a bit on the fence here. I want to be part of the message that says: "Yes, I'm willing to pay for you Twitter!" but without removing ads (and frankly with a pretty bad value prop here) it's not an easy sell.
I imagine the majority of people willing to pay for such an option are power users, the same group that likely generates the bulk of advertising revenues and lives in countries with high CPC.
That's probably how they can hit the $3 price-point though, I'm sure targeted Twitter ads these days bring in a lot more than $3/user/mo.
edit: here's an ARPU estimate for Twitter in 2016, it was around $2/quarter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/430874/twitter-annualize...
At this price point I wouldn't be surprised if they would lose money by offering no ads as part of the package.
https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-details/2021/F...
this is their q1 earnings presentation https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/FB...
US/CA arpu is $48.03 for just q1 (just 3 month not for the year). Global arpu is $9.27.
there's no way $3/mo makes any sense.
$3.72 billion (2020 revenue) / 12 = $310 million average monthly revenue
$310 million / 353.1 million (monthly active users) = $0.88 per user per month
Narrowing down to the monetizable daily active users, the users probably make up the vast majority of monetization:
$310 million / 152 million = $2.03 per user per month
Given that those users who are likely to pay for this service are probably even more skewed than that, yeah $3/month seems low. You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.
Many years ago I worked for a company that had tens of millions of US subscribers, my job involved modeling their behavior in order to allocate resources at least a week in advance. The law of large numbers is pretty amazing to see play out in front of you like that, where you can clearly see the bright lines between your market segments - fundamentally different kinds of people. I have a feeling that there is only one kind of person who would pay for twitter, which will very likely end up as a flag in a marketing dataset that certain companies would find well worth whatever twitter charges them (or their data-broker). Not unlike Volkswagen, on the eve of a big sales push for beetles, wanting a list of everyone who regularly buys peanut butter and cat litter.
But that doesn't sound right to me. Not all products and services are targeted at people with disposable income.
I think the truth is just that Twitter is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Why cut off advertising and data harvesting if people are willing to pay you just to change some colors and the app icon?
Well, it has a tier called (No Ads)*
However, the * is there because it still has ads on some shows.
Surely they'll reduce ads for the public when paid users en masse have access to this.
And I don’t hold out much hope that this will do anything to stop Twitter from boosting crazy garbage in order to maximize “engagement” and sell ads.
I’m excited because I think this will make it easier for competitors to come along and offer a better, more user-focused experience. You can do a lot with $3/user.
Full disclosure: I’m building a privacy focused social network that will be a paid subscription service. https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
Speaking of awful: Something Awful is an example of a paid social club that flourished. It can work. Twitter is a bit large and comes with certain connotations of low-brow behavior (ie the very essence of only using 160 characters to convey a thought), so I'm not confident it will succeed. It'll be interesting to watch what comes out of the paywall though.
It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.
I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed.
The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic.
I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals.
And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives.
I keep away from politics and such.
Twitter is incentivized to introduce engagement-generating garbage into your feed whether you want it or not. You'll be fighting a never-ending battle.
You can opt-out and go back to the chronological feed (not sure if that also includes tweets from people you don't follow) but the setting "accidentally" resets every so often.
"Engagement" also goes beyond ads that you see. If you "engage", despite not seeing ads yourself, you're still contributing to their DAU/MAU metrics and creating content that others might engage with and they might see ads.
Twitter needs to move from an ad model to a subscription model, with subscription fees for accounts of a certain size. The platform would still be free for the majority of users, but accounts over 200K followers (or even 50K followers) should pay for the audience that Twitter provides them with. This would lead to better financial results because recurring revenue is reliable, profitable, and earns a higher multiple than transaction revenue.
5 Feb 2021
https://www.profgalloway.com/overhauling-twitter/
No, Firefox isn't the same thing as Twitter. But if large numbers of people show willingness to pay $2.99/mo to change the app's theme, surely there's enough privacy-conscious people that would pay similarly for a browser that was commercially incentivised to protect privacy rather than monetise it.
I would happily pay a couple bucks per month for a Firefox Pro that’s exactly the same as normal Firefox.
Provided, of course that it’s easy to start and end the subscription, and I don’t have to create a new account. Fortunately Apple provides all of this with the App Store.
A) I don't want to create yet another account and give my CC number to yet another entity who can lose it
B) I guess I don't fully trust them to use the $$ for anything that I care about. Tying the revenue more directly to Firefox IMO would send a stronger signal that this is what matters.
As far as I know it's impossible to donate towards the browser's development.
Its a shame that the economics are so stacked against premium retail software instead of just slinging ads.
Does Twitter circumvent taxes from ad revenue ?
It's like a subtle admission that these platforms are on their way out and they're throwing their own Barnum & Bailey circus just to keep anyone around.
On the late little-lamented Google+, a set of features converged to give this option:
- It was possible to define what profiles could comment on one's own posts, or whose notifications would be visible. I simply piled all my contacts into two lists ("Circles") called "notifications" and "comments". If someone abused that privilege, they were removed.
- The default Home stream could include "featured" or "recommended" content. Individual lists could not. Obvious hack: don't look at the Home stream, and instead have a primary list. On desktop, I further hacked the CSS to remove any references to streams I wasn't interested in following, e.g., the short-lived "Games" category, and "What's Hot" (an absolute cesspit of anodyne irrelevance).
- On successor platforms, I typically set up about three lists in order of priority, often literally "A", "B", and "C". The highest-quality (and lowest-volume) posters go in A, spillover to B, and especially annoying / high-volume to C. If a profile's contributions are not useful, they're unfollowed.
- Block early and often. Where merely unfollowing isn't enough. https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019
- Mastodon has the additional feature of being able to block an entire instance. For large instances (tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts) this may be overkill. For smaller ones with hostile cultures, it's quite handy.
I'll note: HN has none of these features, but it has excellent moderation, and the option of collapsing annoying threads. If I find myself conversing with someone to whom my meagre skills in communication seem utterly inadequate, I collapse the thread and move on. HN preserves those collapsed states (at times this is an antifeature, here, it's useful).
This isn't quite as powerful as the block-user feature, but in the context of HN's other controls, it's generally sufficient.
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
That, along with the fact that Twitter now censors its search results, are the main reasons I stopped donating content to the platform and deleted my account after 12 years.
But you're right in that the changing-back behaviour was there some months ago. I don't know if they gave up this user-hostile behaviour or if they segment the user base in several groups and I'm lucky.
If you don't mute conversations as soon as they become boring, your notifications get filled with junk.
* No ads
* No suggested topics
* No suggested tweets, no people I might be interested in, no tweets someone I follow liked - just show me the people I follow and things they explicitly retweet
* The timeline preserves order
* Threads are grouped together and the entire thread is shown
My client does exactly this (no ads, feed in order) and I can’t believe I have this for free already while others can’t even pay for it.
Even has some awesome features on top of that like muting (people or hashtags). They’re only limited by Twitter’s throttled API at this point. However, literally the day that Twitter opened up viewing tweet likes via the API, Tweetbot had updated their app to support it.
They switched to a subscription model with Tweetbot 6. And while I’m generally not a fan of subscriptions, I figured $6 per YEAR for an app that I use every day and have for nearly a decade is totally worth it to support the devs.
https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter