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Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a b

Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. Common ground might have existed, but they won't find it, because Twitter, like any arms dealer, works better when they fight. It even benefits from collateral damage, when they hurt people they didn't specifically intend to hurt. Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls. If Twitter is going to foster healthy conversation, it will have to change fundamentally. It won't be a matter of tuning some filters and tweaking some ranking algorithms. A big part of it will involve making us the customer, not the product (Zeynep Tufekci: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/965937392942305280 https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/965937392942305280).

krapp 9y ago
>Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. Which is ironic because, not long ago, people were praising Twitter's character limit as a means of enhancing civil and intelligent discussion, believing it would force people to carefully think about and utilize each character, and eliminate wasteful verbiage. But it turns out brevity is only the soul of wit for those who have their wits about them. Go figure.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Brevity is the soul of getting people to read your shit.
  - xg15 9y ago
    I
    - melicerte 9y ago
      M
  - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
    - nuance
- interstitial 9y ago
  Think of the metrics, won't you please think of the metrics. What will all the data scientist and marketing geniuses discuss without their metrics!
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  "As simple as possible, but no simpler" is a great dictum. Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler." And I'm not sure there are any meaningful insights on controversial topics which can be expressed in <140 characters. Certainly there are none which can be conveyed to a hostile audience, since hedges and caveats are the first things sacrificed for concision. Social media already rewards brevity with attention, we don't need maximum lengths. The good conversations should have happened on Facebook (but it's for people who already agree with you), Reddit (but it rewards pandering to the masses), or Tumblr (but it's designed to connect you with people who will threaten to murder you).
  - mistermann 9y ago
    > Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler." I would extend this to most of modern Western civilization. The world is an incredibly complex place, but it's pretty hard to find anyone on either side of the numerous partisan debates that realize it.
    - macintux 9y ago
      I would suggest this may be false equivalence. In the US, we have one party which insists on adherence to a few key ideas, and heretics will be outcast. The other is a much more diverse collection of people with a relatively more diverse set of ideas. Unsurprisingly, the latter party is more comfortable with the idea that there aren’t simple solutions to important problems, while the former nominated a demagogue who for the most part can’t escape his soundbite politics.
      - mistermann 9y ago
        Oh, you'll get no disagreement from me that the Democrats are superior to the Republicans, but they're both so far from being qualified to lead it's pathetic. It's doubly frustrating to open a newspaper and read about everyone peeing their pants about the risks from the scary Russians, who are not much more than a two bit annoyance if it wasn't for their nuclear arsenal, when the real threat to not just the US but the entire world, a behemoth 90% created by the West, barely gets a mention. At least the geniuses who planned this out could have had a backup plan in place for the scenario where they didn't magically transform into a democratic utopia. Where do these naive ideas come from in the first place? Unfortunately, looks like I've been given a time out again, I guess to reconsider if it's appropriate to hold the opinions I do.
- makecheck 9y ago
  It might work if the limit were more extreme, like: “160 characters per day; make them count”.
sametmax 9y ago
As much I can see every single point you make in my daily tweeting, this is ignoring all the positive things happening. On twitter, I also see: - people helping each others - people apologizing (yes, it happens) - people sharing creations, ideas and news - people encouraging each others It's not all flowers and rainbows, but let's not forget about the good parts of it. Twitter is not a hate machine. People have a lot of hate in themself, and they just use whatever convenient medium there is to express it. I would actually more complain about twitter being riddle with bots, advertisers and scammers.
- zestyping 9y ago
  Certainly all these things exist! And they are beautiful. But every platform amplifies certain behaviours more than others. The question is, which way does Twitter lean, on balance? Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on Twitter, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt?
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on LIFE, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt? People on the road, queing at the bank ? And IRL, the system is a safe gard because being a jerk can lead to worse consequences. But that's not twitter's fault.
    - dxbydt 9y ago
      what a naive worldview! it is most definitely their fault. i worked there. there are giant televisions showing surging click counts and impressions. this translates to revenue almost linearly. matter of fact anything you did that had a negative material impact on revenue, such as bot detection would be stuck in reviewboard for eternity. to a first approximation, all the good kind people you talk about simply do not tweet that often. they mostly spend time with their families, read books, go on vacation, do research, write papers etc -thats where the good stuff they share so infrequently comes from. good stuff takes a while to germinate, it doesn’t pour out of you. whereas the high frequency impressions generated by 24/7/365 vitriolic hatemongers, the nra & their supporting bots who have the gall to tell the classmates of the kids who died “they couldn’t care less” - those impressions and their likes and rebuttals go straight to the bottom line. Hate needs to be fed. I don’t particularly care if you like or retweet a happy incident I posted. I am already happy, I am just sharing that happiness. Theres no revenue model there. You will actively bankrupt yourself if you believe in the goodness of strangers like me. Whereas if you give a megaphone to the hatemongers, you will be flooded with bots and viral clicks and hate filled imagery and millions of impressions in a few minutes. i will leave you with a rather strange yet true observation- some of the people whom I’d vouch for without question, incredibly nice and honest approachable engineers, tweeted exactly twice - once when they joined the org, and then on the day they quit.
pimlottc 9y ago
> Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls. Well said. You could hardly build a better system to discourage thoughtful and productive dialogue if you tried.
forgottenpass 9y ago
I like your approach, it's a very systems theory take. Even if it's not a foregone conclusion that a twitter-like system would turn into what you describe, it is also a very foreseeable (or at least obvious-in-retrospect) failure mode.
pavlov 9y ago
Regretfully I agree. There’s a lot I like about Twitter, but it’s clear — just reading my own feed — that for many it’s primarily about seeking that quick fix of outrage. I get carried away too, retweeting some screenshot of someone being an ass in a discussion about gun control or whatever, and later I feel ashamed. Twitter is the closest thing to Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984. Scroll through your feed for two minutes and build up a righteous anger about how stupid the leftists/NRA/FBI/reactionaries/whoever really are.
- guiambros 9y ago
  "Twitter is the closest thing to Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984. " That's a great analogy. I almost tweeted this. Almost.
  - rabidvermin 9y ago
    I tweeted it.
    - tempodox 9y ago
      You will be hated.
      - LoonyBalloony 9y ago
        <3 I don't hate that person. <3 #wholesomeHN Edit: <(^_^)>
- viraptor 9y ago
  > Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” That's what I think of the top popularity celebrity accounts. They show us some message, millions of people see it and then some of them post agreeing/disagreeing tweets. There's no new information in them. It's just shouting into the void, where someone/something sometimes responds with a knee jerk, not because they want a conversation specifically. It's two minutes of hate with people hating for/against the idea sitting in rooms separated by a thin wall so they can hear each other.
vadansky 9y ago
Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. Reminds me of this William Burroughs excerpt At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons--Like this: Take two opposed pressure groups--Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two--Record the answer and take to back to group one--Back and forth between opposed pressure groups--This process is known as "feed back"--You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel--In any quarrel for that matter--Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war and nova
- insickness 9y ago
  “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples - while judging ourselves by our best intentions." -GWB
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Nicky Case has made a lot of excellent games/lessons, but 'We Become What We Behold' is one of his best. The player takes the role of a photographer creating a social conflict to promote TV viewership. Things escalate rather too far, and the result is horribly realistic. It's nothing that will be novel to you after that Burroughs quote, but it's still awfully poignant to be the one making it happen. https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
- makomk 9y ago
  Now add in a complex network of shared ban lists that help ensure that, so far as possible, the two groups never interact except through people on their side repeating the nastiest, most hostile, most decontextualized messages from the other side, and watch the fireworks...
kossae 9y ago
This actually happened to me recently. While I didn’t come out of the situation with “hate”, it provided me a feeling I’ve not before felt on social media. In discussing a topic with someone back and forth, the conversation devolved quickly into insults from the opposing end, which in turn fueled my discontent for “their side”. However I usually don’t ever engage conversations of this sort online, so my mere participation surprised me more than anything. However, it took a short “cool down” period for me to reassess my feelings and humanize this person in my head more than I had previously. I’m not happy about my participation, but it certainly speaks to your point. Edit: To add to this, as I realize I didn't address Twitter directly, I strongly believe it was the character limit and short messages that prevented both parties from offering a longer, thought out discussion with more source-backed statements. I'm fully aware that perhaps this means Twitter isn't the platform for discussing "hot topics", but it happens a lot nonetheless so it's certainly an interesting conversation.
- xab9 9y ago
  Look, it's already fucked. You are talking in a black room via robotic voices, all non verbal communications channels stripped - with twitter there is a harsh beep that silences you or the other speaker every fifteen seconds. Who in his right mind would conduct meaningful conversations in such manner... no wonder that even plain email ends up so many times misunderstood, even if I pack it with smiling emojis, there's a good chance that the other party attribute this to cynicysm (or vice versa). At least in the "old times" snail mail made you sit down and think, you could not fire and forget a message because you had to sit down, write it down, put it into an envelope, go to the post office, buy the stamp, write the address and then go back home.
  - tempodox 9y ago
    “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” ― Mark Twain That quote is a good indicator of what the quality of the average quick insta-message will be.
mylons 9y ago
couldn't agree more. i uninstalled the app from my phone a week or 2 ago, and have been reading books and doing duolingo. it's MUCH harder to keep doing both of those things, instead of going to the twitter website. thankfully, the muni in SF sucks so god damn much that getting signal on your train is out of the question, making reading books the best option for constant distraction.
cabalamat 9y ago
> Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls. The market-based way to fix this would be for there to be lots of social network platforms, with different features, trying lots of different things out, competing with each other, so that eventually we're get ones good for civil discussion. (And also we'll get ones good for other things, for people who want those other things). Building a twitter-like platform is not a particularly complex thing to do. Indeed, it's so simple that tutorials for web development frameworks often use it as an example! So why isn't there a massive amount of competition in the social network space, with users having lots of high-quality options to choose from? And why do we often see complaints from users fed up with how Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc work? The answer is network effects. If I started a competitor to Twitter/etc my site would (initially at least) have few users so there would be no interesting content that would make people go there. Incumbents have an enormous advantage. One solution to this would be to require that all such sites, once they are a certain size, have an API (e.g. something like RSS) that allows others sites to download and re-use the content that their users put on them. This would break down the walled gardens that the internet is increasingly becoming and permit more competition. This solution however requires lawmakers to be both clueful and desirous of increasing freedom on the internet, factors that make it unlikely to be adopted.
- Barrin92 9y ago
  >The answer is network effects. If I started a competitor to Twitter/etc my site would (initially at least) have few users so there would be no interesting content that would make people go there. Incumbents have an enormous advantage. It's not just network effects. As the OP describes the outrage is also generated as a means to keep people glued to their screens. This is a staple of the 'attention economy' that has been growing around social media. The problem is obviously that attention is a zero sum game. Instead of technology bringing humans closer together and fostering genuine interaction and making us more productive, this form of economic activity wants us to waste more and more time, creates addictive mechanisms, artificial anger and so on. It's the very opposite of what technology should exist for. Market solutions aren't going to fix it I'm afraid. If anything they're like a big megaphone that even make it worse.
tachyoff 9y ago
Well-said. The more I see from Twitter, the more I try to distance myself from it. I think a combination of today's political environment and the nature of the internet (pseudoanonymity and not being able to interact with humans face-to-face) and Twitter's short, pithy format creates the perfect storm for all kinds of nonsense. I know a lot of people (typically young, like me) for whom this kind of discourse is normal. Shouting people down is normal. Shunning them if they in any way disagree if normal. Especially online, it's impossible to hold even a slightly different point of view than someone without being considered an immediate mortal enemy. I've been reading books more, including reading things I disagree with. It's difficult for me, but it's getting easier to look at things calmly and rationally. I'm working through a book now by someone who has a different (but valid!) view than I do, and instead of getting upset, I'm taking notes and trying to faithfully represent their argument, as well as trying to take the arguments apart and evaluate them. I think I'll still end up disagreeing with them at the end, but it's helpful to know the counterarguments to something you support and to be able not only to faithfully represent them, but rationally argue them.
Karunamon 9y ago
I disagree on one point; namely I think most of the suck surrounding Twitter has to do with a few UI decisions that could be tweaked at little cost. Not broad philosophical notions (dare I say: bloviating wankery from @jack) of what "healthy conversation" is. This is a topic that's indescribably far out of Twitter's wheelhouse. 1. Notification throttling The experience when you receive a bunch of replies is terrible. Even if those replies are good (but especially when they're negative), you're still dealing with your phone filling your notification screen. It leads easily to feeling dogpiled, especially if the character of the replies isn't positive. They quickly become too many to read and deal with. Notifications should stop after around 5 to 10 replies to the same tweet, user-configurable. 2. Conversation muting It's all too easy to wind up in a long conversation you don't want to be in anymore. Since tweet chains use direct @uernames, the only way to get out of the conversation is to block the offenders (which is a nuke where a knife is needed), or ask nicely for people to drop your username and hope they comply. There should be a way to opt out of further notifications in the same chain of tweets. These two things alone would do wonders to improve the user experience.
- justinsaccount 9y ago
  > Conversation muting The ⌄ menu on every tweet has "Mute this conversation"
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    What they're considering a conversation is entirely too limited then, because the feature appears to do very little.
gaius 9y ago
mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started This is entirely by design. The emotions that generate engagement with social media are outrage, jealousy, gloating, fomo, loneliness. Even if the people running it didn’t consciously decide (tho’ I bet they knew) the algorithms would have figured it out. The entire concept of social media is toxic. And all to show you more ads.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  >> The entire concept of social media is toxic. And all to show you more ads. Social media funded by venture capital, maybe. Most Mastodon instances big enough to need outside funding run on a few Patreon or Liberapay contributions. The main one gets enough for the developer to work on it full time. Social media doesn't have to be the way Facebook and Twitter convinced people it has to be.
  - jdp23 9y ago
    Well said. Social networks don't have to have an exploitative business model; Facebook and Twitter aren't the only possible models.
    - mkempe 9y ago
      It seems that the previous, open, free social platforms are dead or agonizing -- from Usenet newsgroups to blogs, RSS readers, and even mailing lists. 90+% of my immediate family and relatives only communicate via Facebook. All of my past colleagues only communicate via LinkedIn. None of them have personal websites or blogs. So, what are the successful, alternative models that I can use today with like-minded people, family, or friends?
      - stryk 9y ago
        IRC still works a treat
      - 9y ago
xirdstl 9y ago
Well put. I usually refer to Twitter as the "Outrage generator".
wetpaws 9y ago
I'm glad that twitter is the only outlet left where you can talk with people without this PC echo chamber circlejerk that other social networks turned into. Please, for the love of god, if you don't like twitter go to the Facebook, we don't need twitter to be "improved" by gentle snowflakes.
dominotw 9y ago
Don't twitter stockholders want to see that hate channeled into profits. Hate sells.
- smt88 9y ago
  I think that's technically true, although the stockholders don't necessary want to see "hate" as they think of it. They want to see growing engagement, and hate does engage. Facebook had this same issue -- pissing users off with echo-chamber news articles was very engaging. But because Zuckerberg has control, he was able to make a decision to move away from those addictive feelings of rage. It's bad in the short-term for Facebook, but will be good in the long-term.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Hate may sell, but if it drives users off your platform then it doesn’t matter how much engagement you have.
Angostura 9y ago
It wasn't really designed for discussion or conversation was it?
- dfxm12 9y ago
  It's very important to understand that it doesn't matter what a system is designed for what matters is how people actually use it.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    That's what Patreon discovered recently. They thought it was a tool for already well-established creators to monetize their fanbases. What people actually used it for--aside from the top few in each category--was to make a few extra dollars and give themselves enough breathing room to climb closer to some kind of financial stability.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      I don't agree. A generic "well-established creators monetize their fanbases" is still hurt quite badly by charging 40 cents per creator per month. The misunderstanding was much deeper/dumber.
keiw2jzn 9y ago
IMO you’re gonna need to do more than blame Twitter. Humans were racist, misogynistic, selfish, hateful, road raging shitheads before social media. Columbine was before all of these things Kent state Beltway sniper Jonestown Hate crimes everywhere What’s different is how visible Twitter makes it My money is on this being more of a nationalism thing. Buried or purposefully hidden xenophobia and anxiety over being in each other’s faces suddenly Especially with the older crowd that grew up and lived mostly isolated These attitudes were more visible during GW’s time in office too It’s disconcerting seeing a community of “smart” people ignoring a lot of variables and insisting on demonizing Johnny Come-lately It was less work to find a hateful clique before Twitter. Just walk around town and find the right group of people
- stillkicking 9y ago
  No see, this is the enormous blind spot that people have about "hate" on social media. It was the progressive _left_ who pioneered the mobbing, the sealioning, the doxing, the threats, the career sabotage. That is, the people who fashion themselves opposed to hate crimes. Remember the ESA Rosetta shirt guy who broke down into tears? Yeah there was the Verge with "I don't care if you landed a probe on a comet, your shirt is holding back progress." How about Justine Sacco and her tweet about AIDS and being white? That was Sam Biddle and Buzzfeed, and it was anti-racism outrage that missed the sarcasm and self-mockery in her original message. Who can forget the anti-harassment antics of Adria "DongleGate" Richards? She posted that guy's photo on Twitter, engaging in "harassing photography", and the media called her a hero for it. And of course, the biggest "harassment" scandal of all, GamerGate, actually egged on by progressive journalists like Sam Biddle and Leigh Alexander, proudly proclaiming that nerds needed to be bullied into submission, that gamers were a bunch of angry white manbabies, and so on. Taunting from their position of privilege while denigrating a lower status demographic. That's hate. That's selfish. That's bigoted. But it doesn't count because it was "punching up". Because the progressive left has somehow convinced itself that when it exercises power, it stands completely isolated from the "oppressive systems" it deems are driving all of our "patriarchal", "capitalist" society. Now a few years later, the right has caught up, and now it's all blamed on them with the same buzzwords as before. Nope. This is on the left. The left has the media power and networks to amplify this outrage into the stratosphere, the left runs the companies that maintain it. And they continue to deny responsibility and pretend like people defending against their attacks are somehow the real offenders. Those backwards country bumpkins weren't on social media when all of this started happening.
amanzi 9y ago
I deleted my Twitter account when I realised that I was contributing to the sarcasm/nastiness/hatred on Twitter. Every now and again I look at Twitter to see if there's anything positive on there, but almost always it's just snarky comments, outright racism, fear mongering, and a raft of other negativity. Unfortunately, I can't see how this will change.
dfxm12 9y ago
I mean literally generates hate Blaming Twitter is akin to covering your ears and eyes and saying there is no hate in society at large. Twitter doesn't generate hate. Its users do. Twitter isn't broken; we are.
- Viliam1234 9y ago
  The society also has ways to mediate conflicts, but Twitter removed them.
wpietri 9y ago
Twitter is definitely what you make of it. I have plenty of reasonable discussions with people of very different perspectives. It is definitely harder to do that than, say, on Facebook. But there's no other platform where you can find and interact with as many voices, from the globally famous down to entirely marginalized people. That's not to say that they don't have a problem with hate, or that they shouldn't be working much harder on it. But I disagree that it's an essential property of the platform. Humans have a very long history of people of different perspectives hating each other even in person. For example, look at the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... In the US, after the Civil War, we had the Reconstruction, a period of significantly increased racial harmony. Many people of goodwill worked hard to integrate America, with a lot of African-Americans moving into white towns. But within decades the tide turned, leading to a wave of anti-black ethic cleansing that left many places all white for many decades. This is extensively documented in Loewen's Sundown Towns: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-American/dp/0743294483 https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ... Nobody needed short messages or engagement metrics to do that.
- dxbydt 9y ago
  > But I disagree that it's an essential property of the platform. Jack: "We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough" So the ceo himself disagrees with you there. You could take your personal gun to the shooting range and diligently hone your sharpshooting skills. That doesn't excuse what the majority of the planet uses guns for. The platform is definitely culpable. It was precisely engineered for low latency quick trigger back and forth responses which give you zero time to think. Think of it like HFTs. If you charge 20 cents per order, your order book would frankly evaporate, instead of being stuffed with fake orders, you wouldn't even need L2. You could artificially delay each tweet so it gets posted a half hour after you hit send. The dynamics will be quite different, I guarantee that. The dopamine rush will dissipate rapidly & so will the impressions & clicks.
adamsea 9y ago
I think we could make similar claims about cable TV news, newspapers, Facebook, and most websites. I think it’s an interesting question if the behavior we have seen was caused by the design of Twitter, or if Twitter is instead another outlet/vector. Or some combination of both.
swlkr 9y ago
Someone did try to make a paid for twitter [1], it apparently didn't work [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/app_net_is_a_new_social_network_that_costs_50_a_year_it_could_be_the_future_of_the_web_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/...
valeg 9y ago
>A big part of it will involve making us the customer, not the product Bowen: When you get a collection of young, nerdy, socially awkward people together and they're emotionally invested into a website you're going to have those types of problems. Kyanka: So I said to myself, "OK, what's a way we can get rid of idiots like this? Because I don't want to sit here babysitting the forums nonstop." So I said, "If you want an account, PayPal me ten bucks and I'll register you an account." And he immediately went away and those issues immediately went away. Bowen: When [Rich] started charging for forums accounts registrations, he wasn't doing that to make money. He was doing that because he was sick of banning people from the forums and then having them just come back immediately with a new account. Hendren: When Rich put the paywall in effect, it kept idiots out to an enormous degree. It was probably the smartest decision he ever made in regards to the website. You have to put in a little investment if you want to participate and if you're a real shithead you're going to end up paying Rich like $150 because you keep buying accounts, which is good for the site and it's also kind of funny to watch really, really bad people shell out a lot of money. source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-a...
guhan_ganesh 9y ago
In Twitter, I see more hatred in the replies than in the original posts. My rule of thumb is to not read the replies in Twitter (applies to most public forums except HN). I still feel original posts on Twitter are good, as it is purely based on whom you follow.
MikeGale 9y ago
That is not my experience, and therein may lie an answer. Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not. Thinking that your life on twitter is defined almost entirely by Twitter and that you have little responsibility guarantees that you will be buffeted about on a stream, not of your making. Self fulfilling prophesy. Twitter can't measure even the things that matter to you, specifically, let alone get measurements close to your own. They can try to put together a "good default" mechanism that does better, BUT the real contribution they can make is to better help those who can know what they want. Better enable people who want to control it for themselves. If we end up there, this RFP, could do good.
- TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  The question is which experience is the outlier. Social media has a problem in that everybody wants to participate, but the vast majority of people have nothing of value to add. So the signal:noise ratio is going to inherently end up very poor. If you look at message groups with significant barriers to entry you rarely if ever get this sort of 'Twitter-effect'. For instance, I have little other alternative than using Twitter if I'd like to see comments from Elon Musk. And then in looking for his comments within his tweets (as Twitter decided to remove the ability to simply click on tweets + replies when logged out, thanks Twitter) it's full of complete trash. People begging for money, scammers trying to get people to send them eth, people making inane comments, and then some 1% or so actually half interesting comments. e.g. see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968614419784613888 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968614419784613888 There's no real solution other than adding a barrier to entry, but of course the reason people like Elon post on Twitter is because of its userbase size. It's a free marketing tool. Which goes back to the problem mentioned that on Twitter the users are not the customer, but the product. And so Twitter has no incentive to fix its idiocracy since that's what's driving its success.
- gaius 9y ago
  Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not. But the experience is not under your control. Anyone can choose to take something you say, screenshot it, and try to brigade you. A sarcastic remark to a friend or an in joke or one part of an ongoing conversation is ripe for this, and people on Twitter are actively looking for opportunities to do it.

krapp 9y ago

>Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. Which is ironic because, not long ago, people were praising Twitter's character limit as a means of enhancing civil and intelligent discussion, believing it would force people to carefully think about and utilize each character, and eliminate wasteful verbiage. But it turns out brevity is only the soul of wit for those who have their wits about them. Go figure.

matte_black 9y ago
Brevity is the soul of getting people to read your shit.
- xg15 9y ago
  I
  - melicerte 9y ago
    M
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  - nuance
interstitial 9y ago
Think of the metrics, won't you please think of the metrics. What will all the data scientist and marketing geniuses discuss without their metrics!
Bartweiss 9y ago
"As simple as possible, but no simpler" is a great dictum. Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler." And I'm not sure there are any meaningful insights on controversial topics which can be expressed in <140 characters. Certainly there are none which can be conveyed to a hostile audience, since hedges and caveats are the first things sacrificed for concision. Social media already rewards brevity with attention, we don't need maximum lengths. The good conversations should have happened on Facebook (but it's for people who already agree with you), Reddit (but it rewards pandering to the masses), or Tumblr (but it's designed to connect you with people who will threaten to murder you).
- mistermann 9y ago
  > Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler." I would extend this to most of modern Western civilization. The world is an incredibly complex place, but it's pretty hard to find anyone on either side of the numerous partisan debates that realize it.
  - macintux 9y ago
    I would suggest this may be false equivalence. In the US, we have one party which insists on adherence to a few key ideas, and heretics will be outcast. The other is a much more diverse collection of people with a relatively more diverse set of ideas. Unsurprisingly, the latter party is more comfortable with the idea that there aren’t simple solutions to important problems, while the former nominated a demagogue who for the most part can’t escape his soundbite politics.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      Oh, you'll get no disagreement from me that the Democrats are superior to the Republicans, but they're both so far from being qualified to lead it's pathetic. It's doubly frustrating to open a newspaper and read about everyone peeing their pants about the risks from the scary Russians, who are not much more than a two bit annoyance if it wasn't for their nuclear arsenal, when the real threat to not just the US but the entire world, a behemoth 90% created by the West, barely gets a mention. At least the geniuses who planned this out could have had a backup plan in place for the scenario where they didn't magically transform into a democratic utopia. Where do these naive ideas come from in the first place? Unfortunately, looks like I've been given a time out again, I guess to reconsider if it's appropriate to hold the opinions I do.
makecheck 9y ago
It might work if the limit were more extreme, like: “160 characters per day; make them count”.

sametmax 9y ago

As much I can see every single point you make in my daily tweeting, this is ignoring all the positive things happening. On twitter, I also see: - people helping each others - people apologizing (yes, it happens) - people sharing creations, ideas and news - people encouraging each others It's not all flowers and rainbows, but let's not forget about the good parts of it. Twitter is not a hate machine. People have a lot of hate in themself, and they just use whatever convenient medium there is to express it. I would actually more complain about twitter being riddle with bots, advertisers and scammers.

zestyping 9y ago
Certainly all these things exist! And they are beautiful. But every platform amplifies certain behaviours more than others. The question is, which way does Twitter lean, on balance? Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on Twitter, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt?
- sametmax 9y ago
  Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on LIFE, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt? People on the road, queing at the bank ? And IRL, the system is a safe gard because being a jerk can lead to worse consequences. But that's not twitter's fault.
  - dxbydt 9y ago
    what a naive worldview! it is most definitely their fault. i worked there. there are giant televisions showing surging click counts and impressions. this translates to revenue almost linearly. matter of fact anything you did that had a negative material impact on revenue, such as bot detection would be stuck in reviewboard for eternity. to a first approximation, all the good kind people you talk about simply do not tweet that often. they mostly spend time with their families, read books, go on vacation, do research, write papers etc -thats where the good stuff they share so infrequently comes from. good stuff takes a while to germinate, it doesn’t pour out of you. whereas the high frequency impressions generated by 24/7/365 vitriolic hatemongers, the nra & their supporting bots who have the gall to tell the classmates of the kids who died “they couldn’t care less” - those impressions and their likes and rebuttals go straight to the bottom line. Hate needs to be fed. I don’t particularly care if you like or retweet a happy incident I posted. I am already happy, I am just sharing that happiness. Theres no revenue model there. You will actively bankrupt yourself if you believe in the goodness of strangers like me. Whereas if you give a megaphone to the hatemongers, you will be flooded with bots and viral clicks and hate filled imagery and millions of impressions in a few minutes. i will leave you with a rather strange yet true observation- some of the people whom I’d vouch for without question, incredibly nice and honest approachable engineers, tweeted exactly twice - once when they joined the org, and then on the day they quit.

pimlottc 9y ago

forgottenpass 9y ago

I like your approach, it's a very systems theory take. Even if it's not a foregone conclusion that a twitter-like system would turn into what you describe, it is also a very foreseeable (or at least obvious-in-retrospect) failure mode.

pavlov 9y ago

Regretfully I agree. There’s a lot I like about Twitter, but it’s clear — just reading my own feed — that for many it’s primarily about seeking that quick fix of outrage. I get carried away too, retweeting some screenshot of someone being an ass in a discussion about gun control or whatever, and later I feel ashamed. Twitter is the closest thing to Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984. Scroll through your feed for two minutes and build up a righteous anger about how stupid the leftists/NRA/FBI/reactionaries/whoever really are.

guiambros 9y ago
"Twitter is the closest thing to Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984. " That's a great analogy. I almost tweeted this. Almost.
- rabidvermin 9y ago
  I tweeted it.
  - tempodox 9y ago
    You will be hated.
    - LoonyBalloony 9y ago
      <3 I don't hate that person. <3 #wholesomeHN Edit: <(^_^)>
viraptor 9y ago
> Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” That's what I think of the top popularity celebrity accounts. They show us some message, millions of people see it and then some of them post agreeing/disagreeing tweets. There's no new information in them. It's just shouting into the void, where someone/something sometimes responds with a knee jerk, not because they want a conversation specifically. It's two minutes of hate with people hating for/against the idea sitting in rooms separated by a thin wall so they can hear each other.

vadansky 9y ago

Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. Reminds me of this William Burroughs excerpt At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons--Like this: Take two opposed pressure groups--Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two--Record the answer and take to back to group one--Back and forth between opposed pressure groups--This process is known as "feed back"--You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel--In any quarrel for that matter--Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war and nova

insickness 9y ago
“Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples - while judging ourselves by our best intentions." -GWB
Bartweiss 9y ago
Nicky Case has made a lot of excellent games/lessons, but 'We Become What We Behold' is one of his best. The player takes the role of a photographer creating a social conflict to promote TV viewership. Things escalate rather too far, and the result is horribly realistic. It's nothing that will be novel to you after that Burroughs quote, but it's still awfully poignant to be the one making it happen. https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
makomk 9y ago
Now add in a complex network of shared ban lists that help ensure that, so far as possible, the two groups never interact except through people on their side repeating the nastiest, most hostile, most decontextualized messages from the other side, and watch the fireworks...

kossae 9y ago

This actually happened to me recently. While I didn’t come out of the situation with “hate”, it provided me a feeling I’ve not before felt on social media. In discussing a topic with someone back and forth, the conversation devolved quickly into insults from the opposing end, which in turn fueled my discontent for “their side”. However I usually don’t ever engage conversations of this sort online, so my mere participation surprised me more than anything. However, it took a short “cool down” period for me to reassess my feelings and humanize this person in my head more than I had previously. I’m not happy about my participation, but it certainly speaks to your point. Edit: To add to this, as I realize I didn't address Twitter directly, I strongly believe it was the character limit and short messages that prevented both parties from offering a longer, thought out discussion with more source-backed statements. I'm fully aware that perhaps this means Twitter isn't the platform for discussing "hot topics", but it happens a lot nonetheless so it's certainly an interesting conversation.

xab9 9y ago
Look, it's already fucked. You are talking in a black room via robotic voices, all non verbal communications channels stripped - with twitter there is a harsh beep that silences you or the other speaker every fifteen seconds. Who in his right mind would conduct meaningful conversations in such manner... no wonder that even plain email ends up so many times misunderstood, even if I pack it with smiling emojis, there's a good chance that the other party attribute this to cynicysm (or vice versa). At least in the "old times" snail mail made you sit down and think, you could not fire and forget a message because you had to sit down, write it down, put it into an envelope, go to the post office, buy the stamp, write the address and then go back home.
- tempodox 9y ago
  “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” ― Mark Twain That quote is a good indicator of what the quality of the average quick insta-message will be.

mylons 9y ago

couldn't agree more. i uninstalled the app from my phone a week or 2 ago, and have been reading books and doing duolingo. it's MUCH harder to keep doing both of those things, instead of going to the twitter website. thankfully, the muni in SF sucks so god damn much that getting signal on your train is out of the question, making reading books the best option for constant distraction.

cabalamat 9y ago

> Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls. The market-based way to fix this would be for there to be lots of social network platforms, with different features, trying lots of different things out, competing with each other, so that eventually we're get ones good for civil discussion. (And also we'll get ones good for other things, for people who want those other things). Building a twitter-like platform is not a particularly complex thing to do. Indeed, it's so simple that tutorials for web development frameworks often use it as an example! So why isn't there a massive amount of competition in the social network space, with users having lots of high-quality options to choose from? And why do we often see complaints from users fed up with how Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc work? The answer is network effects. If I started a competitor to Twitter/etc my site would (initially at least) have few users so there would be no interesting content that would make people go there. Incumbents have an enormous advantage. One solution to this would be to require that all such sites, once they are a certain size, have an API (e.g. something like RSS) that allows others sites to download and re-use the content that their users put on them. This would break down the walled gardens that the internet is increasingly becoming and permit more competition. This solution however requires lawmakers to be both clueful and desirous of increasing freedom on the internet, factors that make it unlikely to be adopted.

Barrin92 9y ago
>The answer is network effects. If I started a competitor to Twitter/etc my site would (initially at least) have few users so there would be no interesting content that would make people go there. Incumbents have an enormous advantage. It's not just network effects. As the OP describes the outrage is also generated as a means to keep people glued to their screens. This is a staple of the 'attention economy' that has been growing around social media. The problem is obviously that attention is a zero sum game. Instead of technology bringing humans closer together and fostering genuine interaction and making us more productive, this form of economic activity wants us to waste more and more time, creates addictive mechanisms, artificial anger and so on. It's the very opposite of what technology should exist for. Market solutions aren't going to fix it I'm afraid. If anything they're like a big megaphone that even make it worse.

tachyoff 9y ago

Well-said. The more I see from Twitter, the more I try to distance myself from it. I think a combination of today's political environment and the nature of the internet (pseudoanonymity and not being able to interact with humans face-to-face) and Twitter's short, pithy format creates the perfect storm for all kinds of nonsense. I know a lot of people (typically young, like me) for whom this kind of discourse is normal. Shouting people down is normal. Shunning them if they in any way disagree if normal. Especially online, it's impossible to hold even a slightly different point of view than someone without being considered an immediate mortal enemy. I've been reading books more, including reading things I disagree with. It's difficult for me, but it's getting easier to look at things calmly and rationally. I'm working through a book now by someone who has a different (but valid!) view than I do, and instead of getting upset, I'm taking notes and trying to faithfully represent their argument, as well as trying to take the arguments apart and evaluate them. I think I'll still end up disagreeing with them at the end, but it's helpful to know the counterarguments to something you support and to be able not only to faithfully represent them, but rationally argue them.

Karunamon 9y ago

I disagree on one point; namely I think most of the suck surrounding Twitter has to do with a few UI decisions that could be tweaked at little cost. Not broad philosophical notions (dare I say: bloviating wankery from @jack) of what "healthy conversation" is. This is a topic that's indescribably far out of Twitter's wheelhouse. 1. Notification throttling The experience when you receive a bunch of replies is terrible. Even if those replies are good (but especially when they're negative), you're still dealing with your phone filling your notification screen. It leads easily to feeling dogpiled, especially if the character of the replies isn't positive. They quickly become too many to read and deal with. Notifications should stop after around 5 to 10 replies to the same tweet, user-configurable. 2. Conversation muting It's all too easy to wind up in a long conversation you don't want to be in anymore. Since tweet chains use direct @uernames, the only way to get out of the conversation is to block the offenders (which is a nuke where a knife is needed), or ask nicely for people to drop your username and hope they comply. There should be a way to opt out of further notifications in the same chain of tweets. These two things alone would do wonders to improve the user experience.

justinsaccount 9y ago
> Conversation muting The ⌄ menu on every tweet has "Mute this conversation"
- Karunamon 9y ago
  What they're considering a conversation is entirely too limited then, because the feature appears to do very little.

gaius 9y ago

mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started This is entirely by design. The emotions that generate engagement with social media are outrage, jealousy, gloating, fomo, loneliness. Even if the people running it didn’t consciously decide (tho’ I bet they knew) the algorithms would have figured it out. The entire concept of social media is toxic. And all to show you more ads.

rainbowmverse 9y ago
>> The entire concept of social media is toxic. And all to show you more ads. Social media funded by venture capital, maybe. Most Mastodon instances big enough to need outside funding run on a few Patreon or Liberapay contributions. The main one gets enough for the developer to work on it full time. Social media doesn't have to be the way Facebook and Twitter convinced people it has to be.
- jdp23 9y ago
  Well said. Social networks don't have to have an exploitative business model; Facebook and Twitter aren't the only possible models.
  - mkempe 9y ago
    It seems that the previous, open, free social platforms are dead or agonizing -- from Usenet newsgroups to blogs, RSS readers, and even mailing lists. 90+% of my immediate family and relatives only communicate via Facebook. All of my past colleagues only communicate via LinkedIn. None of them have personal websites or blogs. So, what are the successful, alternative models that I can use today with like-minded people, family, or friends?
    - stryk 9y ago
      IRC still works a treat
    - 9y ago

xirdstl 9y ago

Well put. I usually refer to Twitter as the "Outrage generator".

wetpaws 9y ago

I'm glad that twitter is the only outlet left where you can talk with people without this PC echo chamber circlejerk that other social networks turned into. Please, for the love of god, if you don't like twitter go to the Facebook, we don't need twitter to be "improved" by gentle snowflakes.

dominotw 9y ago

Don't twitter stockholders want to see that hate channeled into profits. Hate sells.

smt88 9y ago
I think that's technically true, although the stockholders don't necessary want to see "hate" as they think of it. They want to see growing engagement, and hate does engage. Facebook had this same issue -- pissing users off with echo-chamber news articles was very engaging. But because Zuckerberg has control, he was able to make a decision to move away from those addictive feelings of rage. It's bad in the short-term for Facebook, but will be good in the long-term.
saagarjha 9y ago
Hate may sell, but if it drives users off your platform then it doesn’t matter how much engagement you have.

Angostura 9y ago

It wasn't really designed for discussion or conversation was it?

dfxm12 9y ago
It's very important to understand that it doesn't matter what a system is designed for what matters is how people actually use it.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  That's what Patreon discovered recently. They thought it was a tool for already well-established creators to monetize their fanbases. What people actually used it for--aside from the top few in each category--was to make a few extra dollars and give themselves enough breathing room to climb closer to some kind of financial stability.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    I don't agree. A generic "well-established creators monetize their fanbases" is still hurt quite badly by charging 40 cents per creator per month. The misunderstanding was much deeper/dumber.

keiw2jzn 9y ago

IMO you’re gonna need to do more than blame Twitter. Humans were racist, misogynistic, selfish, hateful, road raging shitheads before social media. Columbine was before all of these things Kent state Beltway sniper Jonestown Hate crimes everywhere What’s different is how visible Twitter makes it My money is on this being more of a nationalism thing. Buried or purposefully hidden xenophobia and anxiety over being in each other’s faces suddenly Especially with the older crowd that grew up and lived mostly isolated These attitudes were more visible during GW’s time in office too It’s disconcerting seeing a community of “smart” people ignoring a lot of variables and insisting on demonizing Johnny Come-lately It was less work to find a hateful clique before Twitter. Just walk around town and find the right group of people

stillkicking 9y ago
No see, this is the enormous blind spot that people have about "hate" on social media. It was the progressive _left_ who pioneered the mobbing, the sealioning, the doxing, the threats, the career sabotage. That is, the people who fashion themselves opposed to hate crimes. Remember the ESA Rosetta shirt guy who broke down into tears? Yeah there was the Verge with "I don't care if you landed a probe on a comet, your shirt is holding back progress." How about Justine Sacco and her tweet about AIDS and being white? That was Sam Biddle and Buzzfeed, and it was anti-racism outrage that missed the sarcasm and self-mockery in her original message. Who can forget the anti-harassment antics of Adria "DongleGate" Richards? She posted that guy's photo on Twitter, engaging in "harassing photography", and the media called her a hero for it. And of course, the biggest "harassment" scandal of all, GamerGate, actually egged on by progressive journalists like Sam Biddle and Leigh Alexander, proudly proclaiming that nerds needed to be bullied into submission, that gamers were a bunch of angry white manbabies, and so on. Taunting from their position of privilege while denigrating a lower status demographic. That's hate. That's selfish. That's bigoted. But it doesn't count because it was "punching up". Because the progressive left has somehow convinced itself that when it exercises power, it stands completely isolated from the "oppressive systems" it deems are driving all of our "patriarchal", "capitalist" society. Now a few years later, the right has caught up, and now it's all blamed on them with the same buzzwords as before. Nope. This is on the left. The left has the media power and networks to amplify this outrage into the stratosphere, the left runs the companies that maintain it. And they continue to deny responsibility and pretend like people defending against their attacks are somehow the real offenders. Those backwards country bumpkins weren't on social media when all of this started happening.

amanzi 9y ago

I deleted my Twitter account when I realised that I was contributing to the sarcasm/nastiness/hatred on Twitter. Every now and again I look at Twitter to see if there's anything positive on there, but almost always it's just snarky comments, outright racism, fear mongering, and a raft of other negativity. Unfortunately, I can't see how this will change.

dfxm12 9y ago

I mean literally generates hate Blaming Twitter is akin to covering your ears and eyes and saying there is no hate in society at large. Twitter doesn't generate hate. Its users do. Twitter isn't broken; we are.

Viliam1234 9y ago
The society also has ways to mediate conflicts, but Twitter removed them.

wpietri 9y ago

Twitter is definitely what you make of it. I have plenty of reasonable discussions with people of very different perspectives. It is definitely harder to do that than, say, on Facebook. But there's no other platform where you can find and interact with as many voices, from the globally famous down to entirely marginalized people. That's not to say that they don't have a problem with hate, or that they shouldn't be working much harder on it. But I disagree that it's an essential property of the platform. Humans have a very long history of people of different perspectives hating each other even in person. For example, look at the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... In the US, after the Civil War, we had the Reconstruction, a period of significantly increased racial harmony. Many people of goodwill worked hard to integrate America, with a lot of African-Americans moving into white towns. But within decades the tide turned, leading to a wave of anti-black ethic cleansing that left many places all white for many decades. This is extensively documented in Loewen's Sundown Towns: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-American/dp/0743294483 https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ... Nobody needed short messages or engagement metrics to do that.

dxbydt 9y ago
> But I disagree that it's an essential property of the platform. Jack: "We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough" So the ceo himself disagrees with you there. You could take your personal gun to the shooting range and diligently hone your sharpshooting skills. That doesn't excuse what the majority of the planet uses guns for. The platform is definitely culpable. It was precisely engineered for low latency quick trigger back and forth responses which give you zero time to think. Think of it like HFTs. If you charge 20 cents per order, your order book would frankly evaporate, instead of being stuffed with fake orders, you wouldn't even need L2. You could artificially delay each tweet so it gets posted a half hour after you hit send. The dynamics will be quite different, I guarantee that. The dopamine rush will dissipate rapidly & so will the impressions & clicks.

adamsea 9y ago

I think we could make similar claims about cable TV news, newspapers, Facebook, and most websites. I think it’s an interesting question if the behavior we have seen was caused by the design of Twitter, or if Twitter is instead another outlet/vector. Or some combination of both.

swlkr 9y ago

Someone did try to make a paid for twitter [1], it apparently didn't work [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/app_net_is_a_new_social_network_that_costs_50_a_year_it_could_be_the_future_of_the_web_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/...

valeg 9y ago

>A big part of it will involve making us the customer, not the product Bowen: When you get a collection of young, nerdy, socially awkward people together and they're emotionally invested into a website you're going to have those types of problems. Kyanka: So I said to myself, "OK, what's a way we can get rid of idiots like this? Because I don't want to sit here babysitting the forums nonstop." So I said, "If you want an account, PayPal me ten bucks and I'll register you an account." And he immediately went away and those issues immediately went away. Bowen: When [Rich] started charging for forums accounts registrations, he wasn't doing that to make money. He was doing that because he was sick of banning people from the forums and then having them just come back immediately with a new account. Hendren: When Rich put the paywall in effect, it kept idiots out to an enormous degree. It was probably the smartest decision he ever made in regards to the website. You have to put in a little investment if you want to participate and if you're a real shithead you're going to end up paying Rich like $150 because you keep buying accounts, which is good for the site and it's also kind of funny to watch really, really bad people shell out a lot of money. source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-a...

guhan_ganesh 9y ago

In Twitter, I see more hatred in the replies than in the original posts. My rule of thumb is to not read the replies in Twitter (applies to most public forums except HN). I still feel original posts on Twitter are good, as it is purely based on whom you follow.

MikeGale 9y ago

That is not my experience, and therein may lie an answer. Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not. Thinking that your life on twitter is defined almost entirely by Twitter and that you have little responsibility guarantees that you will be buffeted about on a stream, not of your making. Self fulfilling prophesy. Twitter can't measure even the things that matter to you, specifically, let alone get measurements close to your own. They can try to put together a "good default" mechanism that does better, BUT the real contribution they can make is to better help those who can know what they want. Better enable people who want to control it for themselves. If we end up there, this RFP, could do good.

TangoTrotFox 9y ago
The question is which experience is the outlier. Social media has a problem in that everybody wants to participate, but the vast majority of people have nothing of value to add. So the signal:noise ratio is going to inherently end up very poor. If you look at message groups with significant barriers to entry you rarely if ever get this sort of 'Twitter-effect'. For instance, I have little other alternative than using Twitter if I'd like to see comments from Elon Musk. And then in looking for his comments within his tweets (as Twitter decided to remove the ability to simply click on tweets + replies when logged out, thanks Twitter) it's full of complete trash. People begging for money, scammers trying to get people to send them eth, people making inane comments, and then some 1% or so actually half interesting comments. e.g. see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968614419784613888 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968614419784613888 There's no real solution other than adding a barrier to entry, but of course the reason people like Elon post on Twitter is because of its userbase size. It's a free marketing tool. Which goes back to the problem mentioned that on Twitter the users are not the customer, but the product. And so Twitter has no incentive to fix its idiocracy since that's what's driving its success.
gaius 9y ago
Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not. But the experience is not under your control. Anyone can choose to take something you say, screenshot it, and try to brigade you. A sarcastic remark to a friend or an in joke or one part of an ongoing conversation is ripe for this, and people on Twitter are actively looking for opportunities to do it.