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I'm no neckbeard (well, maybe I am, ha) but I've been wondering really if the new "Safety Council" will be the beginning of the end. There's already stresses o

I'm no neckbeard (well, maybe I am, ha) but I've been wondering really if the new "Safety Council" will be the beginning of the end. There's already stresses on the system, baroque user name / user discovery, you go to post and you can't condense your point into the space allowed even though you tried a few times, you've been using twitter for a while so the novelty is wearing off, you are in your own place in your own "timeline curation journey" -- maybe you have too few people and you don't get a lot of value out of timeline checking, maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it,,,), maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!? ,,,anyways, this is your feeling about Twitter, and then, now there is this new layer of the "Safety Council Directorate" and the wild west feel is gone from some of the signal, and maybe it even makes you worried about your own potential implosion from a social media misstep ("So You've Been Publicly Shamed"),,, and then you say to yourself, to hell with it, this Twitter thing is getting too ponderous. --- http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-council-makes-a-mockery-of-free-speech/ http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-cou...

daigoba66 11y ago
> maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) Unfollow. Seriously, that's the best way to decrease noise. Yeah, perhaps they do occasionally tweet something interesting. But if 50%+ is just noise, it's hardly worth it. I'll look for their content elsewhere.
r721 11y ago
>maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) One of solutions: add high volume posters to thematic lists and unfollow them. Check lists when you have time for that.
elcapitan 11y ago
OMG. I left twitter a while ago and now seeing that it turns into a digital nanny state makes me even happier to be out.
- coldpie 11y ago
  If you're the type of person to say something likely to be censored on Twitter, we don't want you on there anyway.
  - elcapitan 11y ago
    "We"? Are you the queen?
    - coldpie 11y ago
      Which of Twitter's unacceptable content policies do you find objectionable? I agree with all of them, and I think the vast majority of Twitter users do as well. https://twitter.com/rules https://twitter.com/rules
      - elcapitan 11y ago
        That's why basic rights like freedom of speech exist, to protect us from such "well-intended" attacks in favor of an alleged "vast majority". "Harassment" as in that policy or other "codes of conduct" can be pretty much anything, in particular now that it has become standard mode of operation to claim victimhood for just about anything to silence other people.
        coldpie 11y ago
        The constitutional right to freedom of speech applies to public (government) institutions, not to private (non-government) institutions like Twitter. Twitter is exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech to disallow certain kinds of content on their platform. There is no violation of anyone's constitutional freedom of speech. If you think it's a poor business decision, that's your call, and time will tell. But it has precisely nothing to do with "freedom of speech."
walterbell 11y ago
> maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!? Lists could be used as forkable alternate universes, but Twitter does not provide the tools. - keep high and low frequency users in separate or topical lists, keeping in mind that people may change tweet frequency - create annual (past you, future you) lists and fork each year, removing people or topics that are no longer aligned Instead of Twitter black box curation that cannot possibly serve the millions of niche threads and communities, Twitter could enable 3rd-party analytics for refactoring lists/streams by metrics that are under the control of users. Even the curation signals could be crowd-sourced on Twitter itself, with appropriate API support. Twitter could have an API competition to re-engage 3rd parties. Use the raw datasets already available to academia and identify new signals and APIs to enable client side, human "intelligence augmentation" innovation in curation analytics. As a side effect, curation will provide new signals for targeting.
bonaldi 11y ago
I haven't hammered this point home because I've lost the graph, but have absolutely seen one breaking down user growth month by month, and there's a clear turning point around about August 2014 — which is of course the month the Gamer Gate frenzy kicked off. If there's something in that correlation, then actually the Safety Council is unlikely to be the beginning of the end — but it may come too late to reverse the damage done by the abusers who have run rampant on Twitter for years.
pjc50 11y ago
The safety council is not likely to achieve much, but it's a very necessary step in the right direction. Otherwise the threat of driveby harrasment flashmobs is going to start driving people (especially women) off twitter.

daigoba66 11y ago

> maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) Unfollow. Seriously, that's the best way to decrease noise. Yeah, perhaps they do occasionally tweet something interesting. But if 50%+ is just noise, it's hardly worth it. I'll look for their content elsewhere.

r721 11y ago

>maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) One of solutions: add high volume posters to thematic lists and unfollow them. Check lists when you have time for that.

elcapitan 11y ago

OMG. I left twitter a while ago and now seeing that it turns into a digital nanny state makes me even happier to be out.

coldpie 11y ago
If you're the type of person to say something likely to be censored on Twitter, we don't want you on there anyway.
- elcapitan 11y ago
  "We"? Are you the queen?
  - coldpie 11y ago
    Which of Twitter's unacceptable content policies do you find objectionable? I agree with all of them, and I think the vast majority of Twitter users do as well. https://twitter.com/rules https://twitter.com/rules
    - elcapitan 11y ago
      That's why basic rights like freedom of speech exist, to protect us from such "well-intended" attacks in favor of an alleged "vast majority". "Harassment" as in that policy or other "codes of conduct" can be pretty much anything, in particular now that it has become standard mode of operation to claim victimhood for just about anything to silence other people.
      - coldpie 11y ago
        The constitutional right to freedom of speech applies to public (government) institutions, not to private (non-government) institutions like Twitter. Twitter is exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech to disallow certain kinds of content on their platform. There is no violation of anyone's constitutional freedom of speech. If you think it's a poor business decision, that's your call, and time will tell. But it has precisely nothing to do with "freedom of speech."

walterbell 11y ago

> maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!? Lists could be used as forkable alternate universes, but Twitter does not provide the tools. - keep high and low frequency users in separate or topical lists, keeping in mind that people may change tweet frequency - create annual (past you, future you) lists and fork each year, removing people or topics that are no longer aligned Instead of Twitter black box curation that cannot possibly serve the millions of niche threads and communities, Twitter could enable 3rd-party analytics for refactoring lists/streams by metrics that are under the control of users. Even the curation signals could be crowd-sourced on Twitter itself, with appropriate API support. Twitter could have an API competition to re-engage 3rd parties. Use the raw datasets already available to academia and identify new signals and APIs to enable client side, human "intelligence augmentation" innovation in curation analytics. As a side effect, curation will provide new signals for targeting.

bonaldi 11y ago

I haven't hammered this point home because I've lost the graph, but have absolutely seen one breaking down user growth month by month, and there's a clear turning point around about August 2014 — which is of course the month the Gamer Gate frenzy kicked off. If there's something in that correlation, then actually the Safety Council is unlikely to be the beginning of the end — but it may come too late to reverse the damage done by the abusers who have run rampant on Twitter for years.

pjc50 11y ago

The safety council is not likely to achieve much, but it's a very necessary step in the right direction. Otherwise the threat of driveby harrasment flashmobs is going to start driving people (especially women) off twitter.