Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
- What could be the next big thing
- What they want from new platform
- What tech stack they would use and so on
It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design. The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve. No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform. It's good that we at least see the issues that have surfaced because of Twitter and other platforms. We now know people
- can have extremely polarized views
- feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost
- are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever
- have less and less attention span
- only consume the content that aligns with their views
I can list another dozen issues but you get the point. Instead of trying to fix Twitter we need to look into why these things are happening. It does not seem like a technical problem that the HN crowd wants to solve. It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.
278 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadEven if you have a perfect way to fix the social problems with social media, it's still a massive time and productivity sink.
I don't have enough time in the day to read every interesting article and blog post, let along engage in debate or add a meaningful comment.
Nor to I have enough time top write thoughtful articles about things that I am thinking about, let along ready any comments people might have.
This reminds me that I should be disengaging from even more websites (this one included).
I think this is the problem Twitter/Musk has - Twitter isn't one product but a million. Just about every user has their own way of using Twitter - from finding out about what's goings on in some niche (work, sport, hobby), seeing what celebrities are doing, asking their community questions, discussing politics, finding out news, promoting their newsletter, podcast, crypto scam or product, or growing their twitter followers.
Anything that makes the way people use twitter less optimal is going to piss off substantial numbers of users.
If you see a video posted like that, what do you expect to see? Thoughtful social commentary about marginalized peoples of our urban ghettoes?
Twitter is so much more than the above. To me it, seems like the charge of "racial slurs" is itself a kind of defamation.
There have always been dark corners of the Internet. Twitter's dark corners are so easily avoided, and a fraction of the traffic on the platform, as far as I can tell. Is there actually any data allowing people to make sense of it all, as opposed to allowing them to make a biased argument?
Maybe there's some untapped reservoir of people willing to shell out to have the Twitter blue checkmark, given it used to have some cachet and they will successfully pivot their funding model to a subscription one, but I doubt that will actually account for the difference.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-mus...
I wager you are unable to explain how, because it doesn’t.
These are all typical ways to deflect from reality. I note that your response doesn't actually respond to the meat of my post in either case. You went out of your way to take issue with my statement about advertising not liking ads next to that kind of content.
Reads as: "Even if it was, it's just the 'bad parts' and it's definitely not a big part of the platform."Again distracts from the idea that advertisers might stop spending ad dollars on Twitter if that sort of thing is more allowed there. If you feel my statement is overbroad then argue about the actual thrust of what I said about advertisers' ad spend. Argue that it's not enough of a problem for advertisers to be concerned, rather than trying to deny it's happening in the first place. Acknowledge the sources you're presented, and dispute them if you can, rather than handwaving it away.
Yes, your entire interaction here reeks of apology, including your follow-up.
i tried to use twitter for news and devops/sre related stuff, but you have to drink the firehose to find content or use your network to find people to follow. absolutely does not help that many of the more active personalities also engage in creating FUD.
i use nitter now.
Virality, like any success, involves being in the right place at the right time. This is largely unpredictable.
The problems that social media networks have need to be sorted out on the platforms themselves. The graveyard of dead projects is full of clones of popular softwares with slightly different features. I'm sure many of them were fantastic ideas.
Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. Everybody wins.
Edit: I hoped it would be obvious, but the second sentence of this comment was supposed to be sarcastic.
See the Eternal September as a cautionary tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
They will come, but just know things get a bit miserable in the meantime.
And for this reason I believe social media is fundamentally harmful to society.
The networks are also partly to blame with their recommendation systems.
A 2-party system will always create polarization and lead to black/white thinking in all aspects of life I think.
As a European moving to USA, the part I miss most about back home is the willingness to think of all issues as “Well there’s 5+ sides to this, let’s discuss”. I think that outlook stems directly from our multiparty system where you usually have more than 5 parties in power who need to debate and come to a conclusion.
In Europe, even the fringiest of movements (like the pirate party) often get at least 1 seat in parliament. This may be more symbolic than practical, but it does lead to there being at least someone, somewhere, who says “Yo, this has an impact on fair use! We should discuss”
edit: To expand on why I think this is the why, I’ve found that non-US Twitter is a lot less polarized. There’s the occasional hot button issue that a politician brings up to start a fight, yes, but on US twitter everything gets polarized.
edit2: Perhaps the easiest solution is to ban politicians from Twitter. They’re the ones usually starting shit and trolling for a ruckus.
A gross mischaracterization of which you should be utterly ashamed. Responsibility for the current situation in Ukraine lies at the feet of one man, Putin, and those who continue to enable him.
The issue is how a social media product can solve the problems above and be a growing, profitable company. HN does not have a direct profit motive nor does it need to grow exponentially to satisfy investors.
Personally I don’t believe it’s possible because as long as engagement is optimized, extremity will always be preferred.
I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement.
That is a technical problem. How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content?
If a specific Tweet got a million likes, a "neutral" algorithm might choose to promote it. But unless that algorithm knows that the Tweet is deliberately inflammatory, it can't choose to de-prioritise it.
So, yes, there is a problem with human nature. But it is being exacerbated by deliberate technical and policy choices.
But the most engaging content is also the most harmful / polarizing / abusive!
"The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons.
Actually, the algorithm is not the button clicks, but the code that interprets those button clicks. I don't think many people notice this, but HN gives a bonus to longer posts, in terms of keeping them at the top. It's not just the upvotes that determine which votes surface to the top. There are probably other signals that are inputted into the algorithm, as well, with different weights attached to them. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if certain inflammatory words or phrases subtracted points from a post on HN.
For the forum I run, I auto-generate a list of the top posts for the week. It is based on the number of likes, but also on the length of the post. This is then filtered manually, removing inflammatory posts. HN, with its effective moderation, doesn't seem to have much of a different process.
1. You can design an algorithm that optimizes for engagement and attempts to surface non-inflammatory posts.
2. You can design another algorithm that actively penalizes inflammatory posts.
3. You can further add a human element (a moderator) to penalize or decrease the visibility of inflammatory posts.
These are things that actually happen in online communities. However, they also don't always happen to the degree that would be beneficial to society as a whole. Hence, the problem.
Like other industries (oil extraction), there are negative externalities that can and should be accounted for.
I think forums are great. I think forums are better than Twitter, because they can have some focus. I think social media probably doesn't scale, because social groups will always surface conflict.
I think you can design those algorithms if you know what area(s) your community cares about. Twitter cares about everything.
There are very simple signals of "quality" that are not based on the actual content beyond the length of the post. It's not that different than search algorithms, actually, which don't have the same problem with surfacing inflammatory posts.
Yes, those signal may be wrong in some contexts, but the signals that are currently being used are certainly wrong in many contexts right now, hence this discussion.
People's objections to twitter are rarely if ever that they have objectionable material forced upon them. The objections are that objectionable material is "surfaced" to anyone, especially the people who desire that material the most.
And the definition of that objectionable material tends to correspond to the beliefs common among people who voted for Trump, who won one election and barely lost the next i.e. the objectionable material that should be suppressed is usually the opinion of near-majorities, and virtually always very large minorities of the population. Speaking as a black person - if all black people believed the exact same thing about an issue (but nobody else did), it would mean that 12% of the US population believed it. There are no ideas currently being censored that aren't honestly believed by more than 12% of the population, so a media that can't represent them is worthless for us.
It's not a technical problem to write a politically neutral political censorship algorithm, it's a logical problem. It's like trying to build a coffee machine that doesn't use coffee. It's also a fictional problem that only external defenders of political censorship think exists: the insiders at our major social media outlets are happy to solve the problem of the administration being upset with what is said on their platforms by meeting with them weekly, reporting on what's been accomplished since last week, and getting a new list of orders for next week. There's your "neutral" algorithm.
Just because people want to hear the blood libel about Jews doesn't mean it has to be allowed.
Perhaps with default settings and with no client-side filters. But you, the user - especially a technical user - get to decide what you see.
> How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarizing / abusive content?
How do you as the end user? You choose who you follow, and user filter extensions. What Twitter chooses is of no relevance.
The problem is with the business model. If you only make money off ads, then you need these dark pattern algorithms to survive as a company.
Taking Twitter private gives the company space to come up with a better business model. But there is no guarantee that they'll find one.
But I certainly hope they do: The Fourth Estate used to have a diverse revenue source (ads, classifieds, subscriptions, etc.) but software ate their business model and now all they have left is ads. All those dark patterns are also affecting mainstream media, and unless we come up with a better model, we'll be stuck with clickbait and deliberately inflammatory content.
This is a strong evidence to me that the algorithms aren't actually driven by raw capitalistic incentives but are at least partially a tool to manipulate public discourse.
If it were only held to its own morals then this would be much easier to solve (albeit still VERY hard). But it must make decisions to make $ and grow. It found its local maxima by optimizing for ad revenue, coming from eyeballs on screen by incentivizing and distributing emotionally engaging content - e.g. exciting "dunks" and political drama.
The side effect is an increasingly polarized populous. Seeing drama encourages more drama.
Now that Elon has taken Twitter out of the capitalist rat-race, there's an opportunity for them to dislodge from this local maxima and find a new one - perhaps one that doesn't subsist on human drama. The question becomes, how do you find that new local maxima? What does it look like? How does it make money?
Elon is an ego-driven wild boar in my eyes, but he's given Twitter an unprecedented couple years to reinvent itself outside of fiduciary shareholder duties. Now, what will he do with it? What would we want him to do with it?
Pro tip - you can use "block element" in uBlock to be rid of that stuff. I was thinking a bit what everyone's problem is but then I remembered I'd done that ages ago and never looked back.
Figuring that was likely an exaggeration, but realizing that you just never really know in 2022, I decided to google “knitting scandal” and low and behold the human race never fails to disappoint in its capacity to create chaos among its various communities.
I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following:
1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman.
2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco.
3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi.
The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. This gets people to post the most smug and controversial takes they can handle.
I recommend everyone creating a new social media account every once in a while to see what the rest of the world see. It's as enlightening as browsing the internet with Adblock disabled.
Compare to HN. (I think) We all enjoy HN, mostly because it's quite effectively moderated and the site admins don't have the same OKRs as twitter/FB etc. do.
Discord is a happy medium (just, really large group chats).
I get on average about 1 a day, something about "pumps" (whatever that is)
If using a new account is so atypical that people need to be prompted to try it, then is it really what the rest of the world sees? I'd assume the vast majority of the rest of the world highly curates their accounts by utilizing the Follow feature; the effect of moving beyond the randomness should be similar regardless of whether they are a relatively new user following only a few accounts or a seasoned user following thousands.
I cannot believe how much of Twitter is exactly this.
Enjoy the nuanced discussion.
Are you being serious or missing a /s?
ETA: Just as a for instance, the inept assassination attempt on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi the other day that sent her husband to the hospital.
I find it strange you would read this as sarcasm - it's been pretty hard to miss the descent into fascism of the American right wing.
Someone you follow, presumably?
> retweeted something you don't care about
Are you really expecting an algorithm to make a judgement call on that? Maybe that IS how Twitter is 'supposed' to work - if it is, then I'm glad that's not how it seems to be working for me!
I'm encouraged by recent talk from Musk about 'opening up the algorithm' and even the potential of configuring it. Heck, just give me a decent front-end query language and let me build my own feed - I'd probably pay for that.
No.
>Are you really expecting an algorithm to make a judgement call on that? Maybe that IS how Twitter is 'supposed' to work - if it is, then I'm glad that's not how it seems to be working for me!
A direct reply has higher notification worthiness than something it thinks I might be interested in. This shouldn't be controversial.
It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. Neither of those factors have changed, so why would we expect any for-profit public square to do it any differently?
"I didn't tear down the rainforest, the markforces made me"
"I didn't cause global warming, I was merely responding to market forces"
Please. They wanted profits and made the world a worse place. Don't condone such behavior.
This is an oxymoron, and distills the dysfunction very well.
TikTok is winning the race for zoomers' attention by doing better content filtering. I'm sure that a well-ran Twitter competitor can take all of their market.
My biggest issue with Twitter is not even really that the content is inflammatory or controversial, it's that seeing "a person I don't know calling another person I don't know a Nazi" is irrelevant to my life.
Ah, a variation of "don't hate the player, hate the game". Well, we can and should do both.
“Good” contents that the vocal minority wants are rocket science compared to that. They’re not finding @NASA after another.
On a serious note I think the problem is actually the heavy moderation and algorithmic bubble creation. Then you had certain famous and controversial people who operated above all bubbles and the different bubble started clashing.
The only way I see to fix this is if the "middle" is one bubble. And no, that's not a middle ground fallacy, I dont think the middle position is the correct one but rather that a strong middle bubble is required to separate the majority from extremist bubbles.
Unfortunately a middle bubble required people to be tolerant. But many people lost the concept of disagreeing but supporting that someone should be able voice their opinion anyway. Musk actually understand this so I'm not overly optimistic but I'm curious to see what he will do.
It's not just "disagreement" but the death threats, slurs, allegations of "grooming", racism, libel, and simple fraud (especially involving cryptocurrency).
Heck, Musk himself posted (and deleted shortly afterwards) libel about Pete Pelosi.
There is no inherent different from calling someone a "racist" or "nazi" to calling someone a "groomer". On Twitter these "slurs" are used by different sides (bubbles) but other than that there is no difference.
It might be a baseless allegation or there could be more to it but either way it is clearly an opinion and disagreeing is fine no need to prevent anyone from voicing it.
>Musk himself posted (and deleted shortly afterwards) libel about Pete Pelosi.
I would assume he was being sarcastic by posting an obvious "whack source" with a silly rather obvious made up story. But it went over peoples head so he removed it. (But that is just my interpretation)
But whatever it was, why does it bother you? What exactly is so horrible about posting something "wrong" and deleting it? What is so hard about the concept of allowing people to be wrong about things? Where does the "entitlement" to demand people to get everything right come from? You don't apply this standard to yourself don't you? And if you are wrong about something would you rather want people to tell you/debunk your claim or would you want your "wrong think" to just be removed?
I've yet to see that horrible combination of letters that is too dangerous to face the scrutiny of people and calling it out. Lame slurs certainly dont pose any threat to a stable individual and I dont think we should adapt to the unstable that just make everyone more and more intolerant.
People act on that basis? If all this stuff was totally disconnected from the real world, then sure yeah whatever, but it isn't. The point is that Pete Pelosi was attacked by a terrorist who'd be radicalized by wrong information.
The "groomer" stuff worries me because I know enough queer people who are now more likely to face real, physical violence as a result.
But it's not just twitter. Some of this stuff is in "mainstream" media and politics now.
I'm only OK with you being wrong about things if you're willing to sit in an inaction bubble and do nothing which can affect me, including radicalizing others to your cause who will do things.
>The point is that Pete Pelosi was attacked by a terrorist who'd be radicalized by wrong information.
Where exactly is the point in this? Clearly this happen before Musk's post about it so where exactly is the connection?
>The "groomer" stuff worries me...
I could tell by reading your post but I dont see any argument contrary to what I said. Its just another insult/not nice thing to say/a lie/etc. but there is nothing special about it.
It might "worry" or rather "bothers" you more that other words but that is purely subjective, we all have some kind of personal ranking of "slurs". But what matters is that I would not want the words on the top of my list banned. Not even if used against me.
>... and do nothing which can affect me...
Then we could not have this discussion because clearly it will affects you. I can try to not affect you negative but it might not work and trying is complete voluntary, its up to you to not participate in this discussion if you think I'm not interested in a civil rational exchange of thoughts. You can not demand from me or from anyone to limit their speech to what does not affect you negative. That is impossible to practice.
What others do is even more outside my control. I am not responsible for other peoples action (with certain limitation see first sentence). And I'm not going to limit my speech or want anyone else to limit their speech as a "preventive action" to stop a hypothetical person doing something wrong. That is entirely backwards, the open dialog, scrutiny and tolerance is what should make people not becoming extremists. Preventing people from having their views challenged isn't going to help anyone in the long run.
Also why is "groomer" apparently "incitement of violence" but directly saying "pedophile" isn't? How can one word put people in imminent danger but the other not if they are almost interchangeably used?
Needless to say that if a word is banned people just use a different word or they use codes. So if you are actually worried about people getting hurt you know that banning word and related account suspensions isn't doing anything against actual violence.
That's the point. Both put people in danger when used maliciously. If I told all your neighbors that you're a pedophile and a danger to children, you would feel uncomfortable and probably unsafe. Now imagine that I told all your neighbors, and then started putting up flyers all around town. Would you feel safe? Do you think you'd be able to convince your town that you're not a pedophile? Just saying "more free speech defeats bad speech" doesn't really work.
I'm not talking about banning words. I'm talking about moderation to deal with targeted campaigns of misinformation designed to put people in danger by powerful people with huge platforms.
> these are slurs/insults not acts of violence or incitements
When your rhetoric also often includes violence, they are incitements. "There's a pedophile living in your neighborhood, snatching up children left and right, right under your nose! We must act as We The People to defend our way of life against these groomers!"
Going to my neighbors and lie about me is a real life action with speech. On top of that you force them to listen to you (at least temporally) AND it is targeted specifically at my neighbors which means you have an intent beyond informing people from the general public who happened to voluntary listens to you.
If it would actually be true then you could make the claim that your intent is to protect my neighbors kids (but you should ofc instead report it to the police) but if it is a baseless false accusation or lie then your INTENT was to harm me and that is not comparable in any way with a "slur", "insult" or "mean speech" its an actual criminal act.
>When your rhetoric also often includes violence, they are incitements. "There's a pedophile living in your neighborhood, snatching up children left and right, right under your nose! We must act as We The People to defend our way of life against these groomers!"
Nothing is this example is even remotely criminal, there is no way to find intent to harm someone in that. It could be boiled down to "lets protect our kids from criminals" A (generic) call to action but not to violence.
Its ofc silly to post something like that on twitter but it wouldn't even violate twitter rules. The word "groomer" on twitter is only "banned" if directed against a twitter user or other specific non-anonymous real person.
What actually happens on twitter is people are filmed acting and saying weird, creepy or sexual things around/to kids (Even the POTUS did that) and then people call them "groomers", "pedos" and other insults. I dont see the point of doing that but its definitely not criminal and not an incitement of violence its an insult and expression of disgust.
If you make false accusations about people, and that results in them losing business, or being harassed or physically attacked, then you are responsible.
I can say whatever I want and you can claim it direly affected you or your business but you need to prove malice/intent beyond reasonable doubt. There mere fact that an accusation was false is not enough.
Beside that no statement (false or not) justifies a physical attack so there is no legal responsibly for such an actions. Even if the attacker says he did it because of the person who made a statement.
Exceptions are ofc increment/blackmailing someone to do it/offer a bounty for the violent action/hiring a hit-men/etc. All of these obviously have malice/intent which his what matters.
Consequently hiring a hit-men is a crime even if the hit-man fails do to any damage or never had the intention to do anything and just steals the money. Because again the result doesn't make the crime its the intention that does.
Obviously all of the above is intentionally simplified and not legal advice.
It wasn't just "wrong", it was a propaganda article designed to dismiss a right-wing terrorist attack that almost killed the husband of the third highest ranking official in the country by painting the attack as a "false flag" designed to cover up homosexual infidelity. And Musk is the richest man in the world with enormous, unimaginable reach and influence. For better or worse, the more power you have, the more social obligation you have to use that power responsibly, and that includes understanding how your words will affect the thoughts and actions of others. Musk is under fire because he refuses to use his power responsibly.
If you actually read that article (and not just the media complaining about that he linked it) and came to the conclusion that Musk though the story was legit, then maybe reevaluate the intelligence you attribute to him. You may not like his opinion on things but he can not be that stupid.
Also the "right-wing terrorist attack" is you spreading propaganda.
If the story were straight, and reported honestly, some very few would remain suspicious.
You're looking for conspiracy where there is none. There is nothing "suspicious" unless you're trying to deflect blame.
Instead of waking Paul up and asking for Nancy so he could attack her, suppose he had planted listening devices, or explosive devices, and crept away unnoticed? But you're telling me it's perfectly reasonable to leave the home unguarded when the third in line for the presidency is away. Doesn't that seem like a horrible national security vulnerability?
It could possibly be true, but please, be honest enough to agree that it sounds unlikely.
Because democratic society requires us to agree on basic facts in order to function.
"People are wrong about" things like:
- who got more votes in the last US presidential election
- whether future elections in the US will be fair
- whether global warming is real
- whether Democratic politicians are literal lizard people who molest children
We have seen that when we can't agree on these basic facts, people take actions like
- attempting to overthrow the seat of government
- attempted assassination of political figures (or their spouses)
- election of politicians who say that they will overthrow elections that don't go in favor of their party
- enacting policies that threaten to create a climate catastrophe.
The reason that Musk's tweet at Hillary repeating the conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi's assailant was a male prostitute is a problem is because, in providing an alternative (false) explanation for the attack, it contributes to hiding the truth on this issue. The truth being that we can draw a straight line from politicians' words to this attack.
And since we vote for those politicians, if people are wrong about this, then yeah, it does matter.
> - who got more votes in the last US presidential election
The Democrats delegitimized the outcome of the 2016 election, the Republicans the 2020, and yet we still have a functioning democracy. We're even about to have a round of elections in a few days!
> - whether global warming is real
Seriously?
“Agreement” is a voluntary act. If people don’t agree on fundamental facts, we need more dialog to reach agreement if possible, and mutual tolerance if not.
“Agreement” cannot be an involuntarily enforced mandate.
If people don’t agree, we cannot force them to agree by silencing dissenting voices. Even if such silencing worked in the short-term, it’s corrosive to society’s ability to discern truth.
And which of these 2 options is more likely to make your and that hypothetical admin's opinion come closer?
What about 2 other people reading your post. One agrees 100% the other partially disagrees. Which option from above would be best for them? Which option is more likely to move their opinion more towards something all agree on?
If for any of the above situations you think deleting would be the best then ignore this reply and pretend the whole thread was deleted ;)
I think the problem is crude filtering falsely labeled moderation. What you'd want is a moderator who demands decent quality arguments on the topic at hand.
What you have is just removal of everyone not agreeing with a given viewpoint and allowing intemperate advocates of the given viewpoint to make the position garbage.
In 280 characters?
It's a tough pill to reconcile; make money at the expense of toxicity or find a revenue model that's benevolent. It'll be interesting to see if Twitter changes.
I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.
This is really nicely phrased.
Rather than thinking the OP is wrong, I think this should be another bullet point within their post.
However, I confess I'm leaning towards the more cynical outcome.
One day I was messing around and learned you can apparently favorite/save (I can't remember anymore what they call it), and I had saved a post praising Vladimir Putin. I couldn't remember ever seeing it much more favoriting it, but as soon as I got rid of it, the algorithm slowly stopped suggesting far-right content.
The actual technology plays a major role in creating polarization
(Of course I can't remember many examples, but earlier it was '#confirmed'.)
TikTok, and really any video-content feed, noe has deep AI signals to infer a person's true hobbies and interests.
Which is not a technical problem and is exactly the OP's point.
The underlying problem is a problem of Twitter-the-company, the actual problem of Twitter-the-product is technical and can be solved by going easier on engagement-based recommendations.
Yup.
In the 1930s movie "Meet John Doe", see how a newspaper can try to increase circulation by (a) publishing something, a continuing narrative, emotional (in the movie, a poor person frustrated with the economy and politics and writing a FAKE letter to the newspaper on their decision to commit suicide), (b) creating controversy, (c) encouraging arguments to start, should he or should he not, etc.
The continuing narrative idea was to encourage the controversy to run for some months. The idea of such a narrative was formulated by E. Bernays, as I recall, also in the 1930s. Later Bernays was an ad executive in the US.
Sooo, an old, 1930s or before, idea to create strong emotions, headaches, stomach aches, upchucks, anger, frustration, stress, depression, various individual psychological problems, various political and societal problems, was for the media to create long running, continuing controversy.
Net, whenever start to feel emotions from what see in the media, guess that 90+% of the time you have just been fooled, manipulated, exploited, jerked around by the media looking for eyeballs for ad revenue.
Recall the old characterization of media values, "If it bleeds, it leads."
My old description has been the media just wants to grab you, by the heart, the gut, below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears.
Objective, credible, important information? Nearly never. Brainless, groundless, manipulative emotionalism? Nearly always.
Sooo, I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the MSM (mainstream media) -- they want to deceive me, steal my time and energy. So, for some years, I've flatly refused to pay any attention to the MSM.
Solution for the MSM and the old techniques of journalism? Easy. People just ignore the MSM. That will cut off their supply of eyeballs and ad revenue and they will go out of business.
I posted more at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417798
It only became useful when I copied a highly curated follower list from a coworker. Since then I have onboarded several people to Twitter this way. They start by copying my follows to get it to a useful state.
Its quite clear there is lots of improvement space here.
Humans aren't yet computers, so algorithms are (obviously) not directly relevant to them.
But in the general sense, that clam is wrong. Human behavior is amenable to rules, incentives and social pressure, and technical tools have found a role in shaping that since the dawn of civilization. From simple technology such as voting down to the most oppressive algorithmic surveillance state, algorithms can be used to influence and control human behavior or enforce rules.
The mechanics of upvote/downvote, in collaboration with activist admins & moderators, ensures that comments which oppose the current group think are hidden, while comments that re-enforce the group-think (even if it is plainly false) are elevated and treated as canon.
The result is that opposing view points are drowned out and then stop all together when those with opposing view points realize the futility. To the outside observer, it would appear that the group think is the real world, when in reality, it is not. This is by design and it is not accidental. Given the politics of reddit staff (which closely match twitter staff) one can see the common thread among these companies and why so many people believe the gaming is by design (because it is.)
Reddit is an unmitigated cesspool of mostly 20-somethings who have accomplished very little, but seemingly know everything. It is one giant cluster-** of propaganda save for a handful of subreddits that are actually sane places with great ideas and content.
You are right about it not being a technology problem, but what you are describing there is how you approach a technical problem.
You are never going to solve it that way. In fact it might never be solved, because the issue is politics, it’s people intentionally wanting to game the systems to influence masses and get their way.
No amount of research and surveys to “find the why” will allow you to “fix” it or “avoid it from happening again”.
I think Twitter could, however, capitalize on its platform and offer additional, successful features. Twitter could offer Patreon and Substack-esque features where users could subscribe to additional, richer, and more in-depth content from content creators. Twitter could also re-explore a live broadcast feature with associated live chat (similar to YouTube and Facebook live broadcasts). Twitter is a huge platform and has plenty of opportunity, but I don't think it suffers from inherent problems like Facebook (which has an aging userbase, users abandoning the platform, and a big spam problem).
https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
Also, people talk about the bot problem like non-stop, including the new owner.
It's more like there's a problem with a new technology and people are discussing how to improve the technology.
Twitter is just a technology product that some few people created a few years ago. It's not a discovery like fire where we have to learn to adapt to its nature. We can change its nature radically.
Of course there are social problems that won't be resolved by technology but there's no reason to believe this is one of them. Twitter is a technology that created and exacerbated specific social problems. It's entirely plausible that it can be improved to eliminate and mitigate these same problems.
One immediate issue I notice is that the recommendation algorithm immediately starts siloing you into a roomfull of mirrors. Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow (based apparently on who your followees follow plus maybe other data), so you quickly end up in an echo chamber.
That's not the whole story, Twitter also tries to push-recommend 'noted celebrities' to follow, who can be summed up as the type of people who make the rounds of corporate media weekend talk shows. There doesn't seem to be any way to opt out of these recommendations.
So far it's not a very illuminating experience. I notice that many people get around the character limit by posting images of text, which is an interesting work-around.
Really, I think you'd need multiple Twitter accounts to get around this siloing effect. For example, on political issues, you could set up, say. 'socialist-communist-left', 'libertarian-capitalist', 'state-corporate-authoritarian', and 'alt-right MAGAs', 'politicians and media talking heads', etc. in order to get representative samples of the various competing US political views and actors.
All in all I think it's kind of a waste of time, there are better information sources.
[edit as others note, no real changes from pre-Musk era have taken place, so I'll just look at it once a week for a while]
I would actually be rather happy if this were the case beyond the trivial examples. For example, if I were to create an account and follow someone from the Linux kernel or open-source licensing space, and I got recommendations of other people working in that are, that would be _great_.
Instead, I got Joe Rogan and AOC forced into my timeline because that is what maximizes rage and thus engagement. I'm out.
How does the algorithm distinguish between subject interest and politics? The difference is that for subject interest I'm looking for information specific to my subject, but the algorithm optimises instead for groups that agree with my opinion. I'd be quite happy to get information about my subject interest even if I don't agree with it.
Then also the algorithm optimises for high drama, but that's a separate problem.
It has been an excellent source of information for me, but I am sure to follow good accounts (authors, podcasters, and their guests if they are interesting and don't RT junk), and sticking with timeline view.
Unfortunately that's not how the majority use Twitter, so in the end your take is the correct one for the 99%...
You think they have had time to change anything yet?? jesus
As someone who has worked for companies being bought, changes takes TIME.
You can definitely make human behavior worse using an algorithm just by pushing content that provokes negative reactions in as many people as possible. I don't see why the opposite wouldn't be true. If the algorithm pushed uncontroversial content into people's timelines and didn't reward hateful crap they might get happier. Maybe Elon will give that a try!
It's not like Twitter set out trying to create an outrage machine. Their algorithms learned what people respond to - because responses, interaction, and time on the site is Twitter's goal - and gave them what they want.
People don't want happy, good news. They don't want uncontroversial content. That's the problem, not Twitter, or its algos
It's not like Twitter is committed to being original in all of its concepts. Fleets were clearly chasing Instagram Stories, and Spaces were copying Clubhouse. It clearly understood for a bit that if it wants to grow it needs to do some of the things that attract users to other platforms.
The point is, there are technical and product choices that could change Twitter, how people use it, and the tenor of content there. Meeting both of onion2k and bckr's concerns (less hateful recommended content, generating revenue) are achievable for a social network; successful examples exists. What's _not_ proven is whether we can have a space for dialogue over civic issues which doesn't devolve into vitriol.
Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here.
Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move anything. People would even use links to their rants as replies to regular threads, clearly identified so that people could avoid it if they wanted.
I also did the same for another hobby forum I ran in highschool. With 3 mods and one other admin we were able to keep a forum completely clean for years with ~2 million monthly unique visitors.
I do believe Twitter is about to do something similar.
Readers will STILL complain that you 'subjected them' to a noncon cannibalism fic as if they somehow did not have a clear roadsign at the top.
Nobody gets censored. Nobody gets offended (without ignoring the warnings.) The entire planet cools down.
I have no idea if it would work at Twitter's scale though.
Maybe as a private company, they can start to think beyond shallow, short term metrics.
Only if Musk operates Twitter as a public service, at a personal expense of at least $700MM/yr.
...
Elon's debt service for the purchase exceeds $1BB/yr, for an unprofitable business with $600MM of revenue.
If he cuts operating costs by 50% while maintaining revenue (not likely but possible, surely Twitter has too many people today. or last week anyway)... then he personally loses ~$700MM/yr for the privilege of owning Twitter.
~$600MM of "cash flow" (I think they mean EBITDA) to service the $1BB debt, so he's about half-way there, before reducing operating costs below 2021's $3BB.
Venting can be quite therapeutic but without an audience it isn't as effective.
Also, the community developed a bit of a stigma towards people with garbage posts outside of the designated area. Politely, in order to not themselves be stigmatized.
Could maybe call it the Godel folder :)
Unfortunately, the devs at Twitter hate the way I use it. Nowadays ever 5th post or so on my timeline is from someone I do not follow, either "people you follow follow this" or "might be interesting to you" crap.
It's almost always drama, politics, provocations, people screaming at each other, or a mix of those things.
I can vividly imagine what the timelines of casuals users look like...and it becomes obvious why social media are such hubs for hatred and perpetual drama.
There is little "to solve", because the biggest problems of social media are explicitly created by social media companies.
Or as someone would call it whose business it is to manipulate you and to make you miserable (like the devs at Twitter and Facebook): "creating engagement".
Allow users to properly curate their timelines. Then we can at least take the claim that social media companies actually want anything to improve serious.
I use only the time based feed, and I read on my tablet zoomed into the middle third of the screen so I don’t really see trending or whatever. I do follow a lot more people than you, but I agree when that is all you see, it is like a allow listed Reddit, pretty easy to make an interest and entertaining content feed.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-twitte...
As far as I can tell people are either exaggerating their experience or bad at curating since I doubt I'm getting a special version of their product.
1. dog pic from someone I follow
2. ad ("Promoted")
3. Steve Martin playing a banjo while dressed as a penguin (I follow him)
4. a tweet from an account I don't follow, but a friend liked it
5. a tweet from an account a friend follows, but I don't
6. a tweet from an account a friend follows, but I don't
7. ad ("Promoted")
8. Section of "Who to follow" with three accounts
9. pic from someone I follow
10. a tweet from an account I don't follow, but a friend liked it
11 is an account I follow, and 12 is an ad, but that should be enough to demonstrate. Only three of the first ten items I saw were from accounts I chose to follow, so 70% of the content was supplied by twitter based on whatever they chose.
70%!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-twitte...
You can pick on the devs for choosing to work at Twitter or other social media companies, but let's be clear: the developers aren't the ones calling the shots.
But you can create systems which amplify such behaviour and systems which avoid such behaviour in many ways.
Similar you can design systems which enable fraud, especially social-engineering based ones and you can build systems which makes fraud harder.
And one thing which anyone having run any kind of discussion platform weather in the internet or physically knows is you need proper and strict moderation or things will go down hill.
Twitter always had been doing a soso job. And as far as I can tell things will get worse, not better with how Musks is approaching things as he seem to either not understand the problems or doesn't care.
> - feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost
> - are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever
> - have less and less attention span
> - only consume the content that aligns with their views
This is a bit of a weird diagnosis. The first four aren't problems with twitter, and the last one is simply false. The most politically polarized people are constantly hate-reading content from the other side.
The only sure issue that twitter has is its cozy relationship with the US government, and the personal issue that I have with it is the enormous amount of harassment it allows while at the same time heavily moderating content for its politics/worldview.
Every other issue I have with twitter is technical, like its horrible web design, its lack of interop, the disorganized nature of "verification."
> It's like there's fire in the house
It's not. It's like people are trying to convince us there's fire in the house, and that this fire entirely consists of people's speech about their honestly held and very common beliefs.
1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box.
2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time, always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous.
We're never going to change core human behavior, but the design of a platform can guide that behavior. For example, the HN and Reddit model of posting means that your previous karma has no impact on your post's reach. That has serious implications for the kind of conversations that become popular on the platform. Another example: Facebook's commenting model is not nested and therefore doesn't allow you to have conversations with other people. So what do you get? Everyone screaming into the void, vaguely in the direction of other people.
Everyone talks about "changing the system", and yet all the suggestions are mostly cosmetic like charging for accounts. That doesn't change the fact that every time Elon tweets, it's automatically shunted to a million people no matter how bonkers it is.
The point is that when pointing out issues with Twitter, everyone is focusing on internals. The issue is not the implementation. It's the design.
It's like everyone's saying "the reason why TV rots your mind is because it uses CRT's! LCD is obviously better." Neither addresses the actual underlying problem.
2. of, involving, or concerned with applied and industrial sciences.
Wow, that was completely useless. What's your point? Or was that just a "zinger" to get the last word in?
Everyone's bogged down in how Twitter is implemented, rather than addressing the high-level design of the website itself.
How to pay $1 BILLION per year in financing.
It's not actually possible, no user is going to put up with the fees or advertising required for that level of revenue.