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as a former employee who had the opportunity to sit across the table from some of the execs you read about in the newspapers, let me give you my admittedly skew
by throwaway4123 10y ago
as a former employee who had the opportunity to sit across the table from some of the execs you read about in the newspapers, let me give you my admittedly skewed perspective.
cop catches thieves.But it is not in the interest of cops if they catch ALL thieves. This is not a vaccination program, where if you eliminate polio across the nation, doctors will rejoice because they can now focus on malaria. If there are no thieves at all, the funding for cops will simply drop drastically & cops will be laid off.
So cops must catch thieves, and always "appear" to catch even more, but never actually catch all of them.
If you had a 100% sanitized feed with no trolls and no spam and no abuse, it would become a plain old communication utility, like a letters to the newspaper column, or weather channel or stock ticker driven finance channel etc. Even in those mediums, the channel programmers throw in sordid details like "most disastrous tornado", "worst all-time hurricane", "sleaziest hedge fund manager" etc. They do that because otherwise it gets too boring and viewership drops.
it is very much in the interest of twitter to "appear" to be actively engaged in combating trolls and abuse. but part of its newsworthiness and charm is all this frenzied action around policing abuse and suspending high profile trolls. these things keep the company hip and happening. if you solve the problem for good, there wouldn't be much to cheer about - users may temporarily cheer, but then they'd notice nothing much happening, no controversy, no abuse, no trolls, everything too polite, and soon users will switch to the next racy medium.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- LordHumungous 10y agoYeah. Abuse is a problem for high profile people for the most part, who are an infinitesimal fraction of the user base. For the average Joe with a few hundred followers it really isn't much of an issue. And for the most part public figures continue to use Twitter, despite their grumbling.
- wpietri 10y agoThanks for the comment. The notion that Twitter needs drama about Twitter is interesting, but at first blush I don't think I agree. Most of the drama I see in my feed is about everything else in the world, from global events to small, individual actions. If abuse ends, people will still have plenty to be dramatic about. If Twitter is a reliable communication channel, that strikes me as very good for business. For years, the telephone was an extremely reliable communication channel, so much so that we still talk about "dialtone" as a metaphor for something that just works. But it was insanely profitable. People fell in love and ranted about things via their perfectly boring Western Electric phones and were happy to have them just work. I also don't think "reliable" has much to do with "polite". People can be rude without being abusive, and vice versa. Some of my favorite people are shockingly, colorfully rude, but they are never vicious. Think of a good stand-up act as an example: many comedians get a lot of emotional power from being impolite. But that's very different than, say, picking on an audience member in an attempt to drive them out of the theater. So in this case, I think Twitter and its users all benefit from energetically reducing harassment, death threats, etc. One way to look at it is the venue for a party. At a party, humans provide plenty of entertainment on their own; you don't need a kitchen fire to have a lively and exciting time.