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I've pared down my twitter usage and who I follow, and increased the use of words to mute. I regularly delete old tweets. In a way, the golden days of Twitter o

by chippy 9y ago

I've pared down my twitter usage and who I follow, and increased the use of words to mute. I regularly delete old tweets. In a way, the golden days of Twitter occured when we all were on it, the early adopters. It appears to me that the rapid growth of the platform has not been accompanied by a rapid growth in, well, growth management. Spammers, politics, ideological motivated manual censorship / safety council, bots, spam, flame wars etc, It used to be about broadcasting your current status - the status like what you would update on your instant messaging client. The chase to get as many people on it as possible leaves huge holes for bots.

zimpenfish 9y ago
> Spammers, [...], spam, Could easily be addressed by Twitter but for some reason, much like their ignoring of harassment, they choose not to.
- symlinkk 9y ago
  why does twitter have to be the internet police and crack down on everyone saying something "naughty"? how about, if you feel like you're being harassed, you block the person who's bothering you?
  - anonymousab 9y ago
    I think it's partly a problem of scale. When you become a target of abuse - or mass criticism or what have you - you're dealing with hundreds or thousands or higher orders of tweets to deal with. Often more than enough to drown out the positive, because detractors are so often more vocal than supporters. That can be very flustering on a site with a small linear feed. Individually blocking people doesn't scale. Block lists kind of help but they're a brute force solution and we can all see the problems and edge cases from that solution. It's cynical, but perhaps there is a market opportunity there. It just seems strange that Twitter hasn't come up with something significant in that vein.
    - symlinkk 9y ago
      If there's hundreds or thousands of tweets that bother you then just log off. In real life, if there are thousands of people mad at you, do you get to send police to their door to silence them? No, you just ignore them and move on. I mean if they're threatening personal harm that's different. But if they're just calling you names than who cares? Didn't we learn how to deal with this in high school?
      - urbanj 9y ago
        What's your Twitter handle, anonymous cunt?
      - prawn 9y ago
        In high school, persistent and large-scale bullying is generally dealt with by the school before, as you suggested, the student on the receiving end takes the much more drastic step of moving schools.
      - anonymousab 9y ago
        > But if they're just calling you names than who cares? People are very social and, for better or worse, social media is a direct extension of the social lives of many people. "Turning it off" can be the same as cutting out an important part of their life.
    - petraeus 9y ago
      Thats the intention of bullying to silence your voice ...
- stevekemp 9y ago
  What's the best metric Twitter can use to say they're doing well? It's number of users. So fake users improve their rankings, and their "performance". Today I posted a tweet, I received 12 "likes". 9 were from profiles created this month, with no profile details, no picture, and content which was 100% retweets. Fake users.
  - rmetzler 9y ago
    Yeah, and it's the same for Reddit. They don't care for bots reposting content they stole from legitimate users, because it makes the site look good.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - CM30 9y ago
    And when you consider the other best metric for the company is activity/tweets per second/minute/hour/day, you can probably figure out the other half of why they don't crack down trolling, bullying or harassment in general. Being an overly confrontational jerk gets people replying to you, which makes the stats look good.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
I made my first Twitter account shortly after it launched, so there's a good chance I'm an earlier adopter than most people who complain about how it's changed. Many would, unfortunately, read any of my LGBTQ friends (for example) venting about the harassment they get for who they are as "political." What's political/ideological/junk/whatever to one person is a central and valuable function of the platform to others. This is their "current status," which they broadcast, and it's unavoidably political because certain groups have decided to politicize innocent and harmless attributes. I would not have met my best friend, who I can talk to about this stuff when Twitter seems inappropriate, without Twitter. For you, it's a place to chill and chat. For me and many like me, it's a lifeline in hostile territory.
- bauerd 9y ago
  Twitter was never a place "to chill and chat" to me. I was an early adopter as well and used it as a more personal RSS reader. I followed mostly software developers and tech outlets. I honestly enjoyed the mix of 140-character tech discussion and the occasional insights into other devs' work and personal life. At some point however, my personal feed was full of drama, politics, gender, bullshit, nonsense, … It was worse than my Facebook feed. and the platform gave me 0 control over what I see from whom. The best I could do was to follow, hope for the best, unfollow, rinse and repeat. I quit a long time ago, and I don't look back.
- chippy 9y ago
  When did Twitter turn into hostile territory? Or are you saying that the world outside of Twitter is hostile and Twitter is some way of dealing with that in the present day? I remember when people started being harassed on Twitter, and it wasn't close to the launch, rather it was when it was sometime after it became massively popular. If we can try to remember we will see that it was different back then when we were early adopters.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    Outside world. You should get to know your LGBTQ and other marginalized friends better if you aren't aware of how bad things are. Twitter may have been the first place they found anyone else like them. Even accepting environments (rare) can be difficult to cope with if you have no one to talk to who really understands what it's like.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chippy 9y ago
Odd I posted this comment 3 days ago, but it says 2 hours... and the thread is back on the front page.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  It says 3 days on your profile, but the link and discussion are new. Might be a bug.
  - privong 9y ago
    Discussions are sometimes re-bumped by the mods if they feel it is an interesting topic and didn't get enough discussion the first time around. dang describes it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380
    - chippy 9y ago
      Thank you, learnt something new today!
loeber 9y ago
You mentioned regularly deleting old tweets, so I'll share a useful tool I built: For deleting and archiving both posted and liked tweets: https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets The archive feature downloads the JSON for a tweet, including any images.
Karunamon 9y ago
There's a service called TweetDelete that will automate this. Given the nature of Twitter as a ephemeral communication platform, there's very little value to having old tweets anyways. I have mine set to purge anything older than a month.

by chippy 9y ago

zimpenfish 9y ago

> Spammers, [...], spam, Could easily be addressed by Twitter but for some reason, much like their ignoring of harassment, they choose not to.

symlinkk 9y ago
why does twitter have to be the internet police and crack down on everyone saying something "naughty"? how about, if you feel like you're being harassed, you block the person who's bothering you?
- anonymousab 9y ago
  I think it's partly a problem of scale. When you become a target of abuse - or mass criticism or what have you - you're dealing with hundreds or thousands or higher orders of tweets to deal with. Often more than enough to drown out the positive, because detractors are so often more vocal than supporters. That can be very flustering on a site with a small linear feed. Individually blocking people doesn't scale. Block lists kind of help but they're a brute force solution and we can all see the problems and edge cases from that solution. It's cynical, but perhaps there is a market opportunity there. It just seems strange that Twitter hasn't come up with something significant in that vein.
  - symlinkk 9y ago
    If there's hundreds or thousands of tweets that bother you then just log off. In real life, if there are thousands of people mad at you, do you get to send police to their door to silence them? No, you just ignore them and move on. I mean if they're threatening personal harm that's different. But if they're just calling you names than who cares? Didn't we learn how to deal with this in high school?
    - urbanj 9y ago
      What's your Twitter handle, anonymous cunt?
    - prawn 9y ago
      In high school, persistent and large-scale bullying is generally dealt with by the school before, as you suggested, the student on the receiving end takes the much more drastic step of moving schools.
    - anonymousab 9y ago
      > But if they're just calling you names than who cares? People are very social and, for better or worse, social media is a direct extension of the social lives of many people. "Turning it off" can be the same as cutting out an important part of their life.
  - petraeus 9y ago
    Thats the intention of bullying to silence your voice ...
stevekemp 9y ago
What's the best metric Twitter can use to say they're doing well? It's number of users. So fake users improve their rankings, and their "performance". Today I posted a tweet, I received 12 "likes". 9 were from profiles created this month, with no profile details, no picture, and content which was 100% retweets. Fake users.
- rmetzler 9y ago
  Yeah, and it's the same for Reddit. They don't care for bots reposting content they stole from legitimate users, because it makes the site look good.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- CM30 9y ago
  And when you consider the other best metric for the company is activity/tweets per second/minute/hour/day, you can probably figure out the other half of why they don't crack down trolling, bullying or harassment in general. Being an overly confrontational jerk gets people replying to you, which makes the stats look good.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

I made my first Twitter account shortly after it launched, so there's a good chance I'm an earlier adopter than most people who complain about how it's changed. Many would, unfortunately, read any of my LGBTQ friends (for example) venting about the harassment they get for who they are as "political." What's political/ideological/junk/whatever to one person is a central and valuable function of the platform to others. This is their "current status," which they broadcast, and it's unavoidably political because certain groups have decided to politicize innocent and harmless attributes. I would not have met my best friend, who I can talk to about this stuff when Twitter seems inappropriate, without Twitter. For you, it's a place to chill and chat. For me and many like me, it's a lifeline in hostile territory.

bauerd 9y ago
Twitter was never a place "to chill and chat" to me. I was an early adopter as well and used it as a more personal RSS reader. I followed mostly software developers and tech outlets. I honestly enjoyed the mix of 140-character tech discussion and the occasional insights into other devs' work and personal life. At some point however, my personal feed was full of drama, politics, gender, bullshit, nonsense, … It was worse than my Facebook feed. and the platform gave me 0 control over what I see from whom. The best I could do was to follow, hope for the best, unfollow, rinse and repeat. I quit a long time ago, and I don't look back.
chippy 9y ago
When did Twitter turn into hostile territory? Or are you saying that the world outside of Twitter is hostile and Twitter is some way of dealing with that in the present day? I remember when people started being harassed on Twitter, and it wasn't close to the launch, rather it was when it was sometime after it became massively popular. If we can try to remember we will see that it was different back then when we were early adopters.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  Outside world. You should get to know your LGBTQ and other marginalized friends better if you aren't aware of how bad things are. Twitter may have been the first place they found anyone else like them. Even accepting environments (rare) can be difficult to cope with if you have no one to talk to who really understands what it's like.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chippy 9y ago

Odd I posted this comment 3 days ago, but it says 2 hours... and the thread is back on the front page.

rainbowmverse 9y ago
It says 3 days on your profile, but the link and discussion are new. Might be a bug.
- privong 9y ago
  Discussions are sometimes re-bumped by the mods if they feel it is an interesting topic and didn't get enough discussion the first time around. dang describes it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380
  - chippy 9y ago
    Thank you, learnt something new today!

loeber 9y ago

You mentioned regularly deleting old tweets, so I'll share a useful tool I built: For deleting and archiving both posted and liked tweets: https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets The archive feature downloads the JSON for a tweet, including any images.

Karunamon 9y ago

There's a service called TweetDelete that will automate this. Given the nature of Twitter as a ephemeral communication platform, there's very little value to having old tweets anyways. I have mine set to purge anything older than a month.