Not a single thing about harassment. Why? Does Twitter's technical leadership think the problem is that irrelevant that it's not worth putting on the roadmap? Does the media care so little about it that they don't ask the questions?
My view is that Twitter has a big problem with harassment. I want to know what Twitter plans to do about it.
"From a business perspective what is the incentive for twitter to solve such a problem?"
From a business perspective, being perceived as a platform for trolls and harassment is really bad for the brand - even if its a minority of users who are causally throwing out rape threats and other abusive garbage at other users, they are incredibly toxic.
> My view is that Twitter has a big problem with harassment. I want to know what Twitter plans to do about it.
I don't know if Twitter does that,but they could have a function so that people only receive tweets from people they follow at first place,while keeping their tweet public.
Anyway, people take twitter way too seriously. It's the internet, anonymous people are going to be mean.
I have had some harsh stuff said to me on the internet, but it doesn't compare to the things high profile twitter users get said at them. It's really easy to dismiss the severity of something when you aren't on the receiving end.
You may have not noticed yet, but it no longer 1996, where "the Internet" is some weird thing that has little relation to mainstream society. Many, many people cannot just say, "Well gosh, this Internet thing is mean, I will quit it." Their participation is professionally necessary.
Twitter is trying to provide a major global platform for conversation. In doing so, they have also accidentally created a smashing tool for organizing and committing harassment and abuse. If they really want to play in the big leagues, they are going to have to solve that.
Internet opinion hardly matters in most cases.People should be paying too much attention on internet drama. Twitter included. If you don't like that,nobody's forcing anyone to use Twitter.
I think the article didn't mention it since Twitter has released a number of changes since Dec. to work on improving handling of harassment with the streamlining of the block/report UI, higher prioritization of handling abusive/threatening posts, and new harassment policies. Internally they have been formulating plans to do more. No idea how things will pan out, but Twitter is clearly working on it.
Dick Costolo talked about it on their most recent call;
We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform
and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the
rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core
user after core user by not addressing simple trolling
issues that they face every day.
I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this
issue during my tenure as CEO. It's absurd. There's no
excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being
more aggressive on this front. It's nobody else's fault
but mine, and it's embarrassing.
We're going to start kicking these people off right and
left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous
attacks, nobody hears them.
Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.
Whether or not they come up with a solution or prioritize it with their technical team remains to be seen, but I think it's a very good start that the CEO has claimed personal responsibility for the issue.
You don't think they're going to start doing something? I think Twitter realises that they've lost a lot of high-profile people as users because of this.
At least for me, one of the great things about Twitter is being able to interact with otherwise inapproachable people (if only due to the friction of sending/replying to e-mail). Even if it's just to make a bad pun. Having that poisoned by people parroting "ethics in video game journalism" makes me pretty sad.
I wonder if that's just a UX issue though. There are already many services which post the first 100-odd characters before continuing onto a link with the full text.
Would it be so difficult for Twitter to come up with a native card for longer tweets ?
I would like a social network where I can choose people to "follow", and then I can see when those people post things. That means:
1) Don't show posts from people I don't follow
2) Don't hide posts from people I do follow
Facebook gave up on that years ago, and that's probably one of the reasons I've mostly stopped using it. Now Twitter is following in the same footsteps. More and more I'm getting posts showing up in my Twitter timeline that are not from people I follow and weren't retweeted, they are just "person X follows this account, so here's a tweet from it". No! If I cared, I'd have followed it myself.
And now all this talk about showing "important" tweets that Twitter thinks I "missed". Stop it! You don't know what I think is important. Again, this is what drove me away from Facebook.
(Not even talking about ads/"sponsored tweets" here, though that doesn't help either.)
As a publisher this is the reason I have put quite a bit more effort into my email newsletter rather than Twitter or Facebook.
Twitter is much more about real-time updates and conversation, so it makes sense that it isn't the best medium for letting people know what was recently published. Facebook though seems like a good medium, but apparently the people that like my page don't interact with the content so they don't get to see it in their feeds.
Email newsletters are great because people can easily subscribe/unsubscribe at their leisure and I know who is reading them whereas it is pretty much a mystery on other services.
From a readers perspective, your comments are exactly why I love instagram so much. I can easily follow/unfollow people and my newsfeed is only filled with posts from people I followed plus the occasional ad. And if I want related material, I can go to the browse page which has posts that are popular in my network.
EDIT: I'd love a service that was like a combination of instagram + RSS reader where I could subscribe to both blogs and people and can easily follow/unfollow, and have it not be so fast moving but still see all of the updates that are posted.
The "timeline" trend is what really throws me off.
Although an algorithmically generated timeline seems like a useful feature, it's not long before it becomes saturated with irrelevant content. To add to your example of Facebook, Soundcloud also suffers a similar, although milder problem.
Tracks are unfairly ordered and prioritized, which leads to a lot of big names again and again, with the other users left behind.
Twitter's choice to follow in these footsteps may be an easy one, but surely not the best.
As a 3rd party app user I don't see any of this nonsense. I don't care if I get features months later (if at all), the core experience works correctly.
No ads/sponsored content yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time. I'd be happy to pay to get rid of them.
> Stop it! You don't know what I think is important. Again, this is what drove me away from Facebook.
You know, it's extremely possible for them to figure out what is important to you. Especially considering that the behaviour on Twitter is more interests-based than relationship-based, it's fairly plausible to assume that Twitter can guess content that you didn't see but would find interesting
I find Twitter to be the least offensive of the SNS stuff (excluding maybe LINE for being based almost entirely on sticker revenue). The ads are usually pretty relevant, very obviously ads, and not super intrusive.
If that's the cost I have to pay to easily have quick conversations with famous people on the internet (or get support from some company), then that's great. There's a balance, obviously ( I am not a superfan of the "X people favorited" thing), but Twitter's value comes from how well it can figure this stuff out
While I agree in premise, the fact it isn't an opt-in/opt-out thing is broken. There is such a thing as information overload... maybe that thing I missed is something I didn't want to see in the first place - it should be my decision, not theirs.
That pretty much describes how Ello works for now.
The challenges are 1) finding interesting people to follow and 2) encouraging interesting people to post content.
I joined with much of the early-adopter crowd in September. I really like a lot of things about the site (though I've also got my usual frustrations). But what @quinn (Quinn Norton) has to say is pretty on mark: if the people you're interested in hearing from (and she's on I am) don't post, then the value of the network itself falls.
My suggestion is that there be a cross of social and interest graphs. That a set of "channels" be created that you can follow. That would take some programming, and in the interim Ello's come up with a concept of official curated interest-oriented accounts. Tag those accounts in your own posts to have submissions considered for curation. I like the idea, and think it's an innovative one busting out of many of the current online models (though it might be similar in ways to Medium or other curated content sites).
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] threadMy view is that Twitter has a big problem with harassment. I want to know what Twitter plans to do about it.
From a business perspective what is the incentive for twitter to solve such a problem?
From a business perspective, being perceived as a platform for trolls and harassment is really bad for the brand - even if its a minority of users who are causally throwing out rape threats and other abusive garbage at other users, they are incredibly toxic.
It's only a matter of time before some lawsuits name them or they get investigated by AGs for negligence/willfully blindness.
Either way it DOES drive users away.
I don't know if Twitter does that,but they could have a function so that people only receive tweets from people they follow at first place,while keeping their tweet public.
Anyway, people take twitter way too seriously. It's the internet, anonymous people are going to be mean.
Twitter is trying to provide a major global platform for conversation. In doing so, they have also accidentally created a smashing tool for organizing and committing harassment and abuse. If they really want to play in the big leagues, they are going to have to solve that.
From: http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-me...
So far it looks like too-little-too-late PR and nothing more.
At least for me, one of the great things about Twitter is being able to interact with otherwise inapproachable people (if only due to the friction of sending/replying to e-mail). Even if it's just to make a bad pun. Having that poisoned by people parroting "ethics in video game journalism" makes me pretty sad.
(Anyone who mentions "legacy clients" can forever hold their peace)
Would it be so difficult for Twitter to come up with a native card for longer tweets ?
Now, I didn't mean that character limits be removed completely, but a 250-character limit seems to be a good trade-off.
1) Don't show posts from people I don't follow 2) Don't hide posts from people I do follow
Facebook gave up on that years ago, and that's probably one of the reasons I've mostly stopped using it. Now Twitter is following in the same footsteps. More and more I'm getting posts showing up in my Twitter timeline that are not from people I follow and weren't retweeted, they are just "person X follows this account, so here's a tweet from it". No! If I cared, I'd have followed it myself.
And now all this talk about showing "important" tweets that Twitter thinks I "missed". Stop it! You don't know what I think is important. Again, this is what drove me away from Facebook.
(Not even talking about ads/"sponsored tweets" here, though that doesn't help either.)
Twitter is much more about real-time updates and conversation, so it makes sense that it isn't the best medium for letting people know what was recently published. Facebook though seems like a good medium, but apparently the people that like my page don't interact with the content so they don't get to see it in their feeds.
Email newsletters are great because people can easily subscribe/unsubscribe at their leisure and I know who is reading them whereas it is pretty much a mystery on other services.
From a readers perspective, your comments are exactly why I love instagram so much. I can easily follow/unfollow people and my newsfeed is only filled with posts from people I followed plus the occasional ad. And if I want related material, I can go to the browse page which has posts that are popular in my network.
EDIT: I'd love a service that was like a combination of instagram + RSS reader where I could subscribe to both blogs and people and can easily follow/unfollow, and have it not be so fast moving but still see all of the updates that are posted.
Twitter's choice to follow in these footsteps may be an easy one, but surely not the best.
No ads/sponsored content yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time. I'd be happy to pay to get rid of them.
You know, it's extremely possible for them to figure out what is important to you. Especially considering that the behaviour on Twitter is more interests-based than relationship-based, it's fairly plausible to assume that Twitter can guess content that you didn't see but would find interesting
I find Twitter to be the least offensive of the SNS stuff (excluding maybe LINE for being based almost entirely on sticker revenue). The ads are usually pretty relevant, very obviously ads, and not super intrusive.
If that's the cost I have to pay to easily have quick conversations with famous people on the internet (or get support from some company), then that's great. There's a balance, obviously ( I am not a superfan of the "X people favorited" thing), but Twitter's value comes from how well it can figure this stuff out
The challenges are 1) finding interesting people to follow and 2) encouraging interesting people to post content.
I joined with much of the early-adopter crowd in September. I really like a lot of things about the site (though I've also got my usual frustrations). But what @quinn (Quinn Norton) has to say is pretty on mark: if the people you're interested in hearing from (and she's on I am) don't post, then the value of the network itself falls.
https://ello.co/quinn/post/oY_qw2Ug5znFhsIk5Nir4w
My suggestion is that there be a cross of social and interest graphs. That a set of "channels" be created that you can follow. That would take some programming, and in the interim Ello's come up with a concept of official curated interest-oriented accounts. Tag those accounts in your own posts to have submissions considered for curation. I like the idea, and think it's an innovative one busting out of many of the current online models (though it might be similar in ways to Medium or other curated content sites).
On channels: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/FTpX7LWNFjtOpYGu5xRkHg
The curated profiles: https://ello.co/chelseahelen/post/Nl9Xz4m8OdxwP8mabwePHw
For people? No, unless you like to follow kids or narcissistic adults.
In other words, there is no content. But it's great for support purposes.