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A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world

172 points by shaki-dora 9y ago

Arubis 9y ago
I fully expected that this title was a reference to the more-famed A Modest Proposal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal Rather surprised that The Atlantic wouldn't have been self-aware re: the title.
- mc32 9y ago
  I'm sure they are aware. It's highly unlikely any writer for the Atlantic would be ignorant of that proposal. They probably just wanted to go forth with the plain meaning.
  - marshray 9y ago
    That we continually over-use this old gag is one of my favorite things about the English speaking world. :-)
flafla2 9y ago
> This article appears in the April 2018 print edition with the headline “The Case Against Retweets.” So the title was changed from "The Case Against Retweets" to "Retweets are Trash". Seems that the editor took the author's advice on creating sharable content - this is a pretty clear-cut appeal to emotion.
noobermin 9y ago
Dumb HN-tier nitpick, but when people use the words "modest proposal" do they know where it comes from? The original modest proposal was satire and it's a little bit of cognitive dissonance for me to see it used seriously in a title. Regardless, I find the amplification part of twitter to be the best part, although I don't really feel like I see more outrage than joy or just humor. I think it has a lot to do with who you choose to follow.
- eggpy 9y ago
  I could make the argument that the article uses it well, whether or not that was the authors intention. It is a fitting allegory if you stretch it. Swift's proposal is satire in order to capture the attention of readers and point it to abuses of power. One could make an allusion to poor children serving the public good and how that relates to morals and values with the spread of (negative) viral content and how tweet-babies could be better served better for consumption by the public. I haven't thought it through much more than that, but I could see it.
- hnal943 9y ago
  Agree. Before I read the article I assumed that this would be a tongue-in-cheek series of suggestions that would destroy twitter.
- dang 9y ago
  Of course they know. But to punish them for annoying you we have deprived them of their modesty above.
paladin314159 9y ago
> But social-media platforms don’t have to be organized around shareability. Instagram, for instance, doesn’t allow links, except a single one in each user’s profile. This dampens self-promotion and slows down the spread of information from the rest of the internet on the platform. It doesn’t have native reposting tools, either. And it is, by pretty much all accounts, a nicer place to spend time online. While it may have that going for it, wasn't Instagram recently considered the worst social media app for mental health? https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social-network-app-young-people-mental-health/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social... I'm not convinced that dampening self-promotion and discouraging reposting are sufficient conditions for considering one platform to be better than the other.
ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago
Here's my modest proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world. Don't use Twitter.
Y_Y 9y ago
This article irritatingly mixes up the ß (eszett, or ss ligature), the italic version of the same ligature and the greek letter beta (or it's math-unicode alternative). [edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.] Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.
- draugadrotten 9y ago
  > Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method. Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so, or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are reposted retweets. How does it look for you? Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the amplification of the network effect.
  - rythie 9y ago
    I agree with this, on Twitter and Facebook I will very often repost stuff, but on Instagram I never do. However, I do think it's hard to get noticed on Instagram (if that's what you want), due to the lack of native sharing, likes are on someone else's feed and often don't even get a follow from a popular share.
    - kitd 9y ago
      It may be related to the target platform for Instagram and Snapchat being mobile devices. Copy-pasting on mobile tends to be more cumbersome, and the slightest impediment to the UX can have a significant effect on how many times it occurs.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Even some networks with retweeting don't suffer this as much. Most of my mastodon feed is posts, a retweet(boost) is probably one in 50 on a normal day, spiking to maybe one in 10. It might be a cultural problem on twitter (maybe some mastodon communities have similar problems...)
dingaling 9y ago
I don't have a Twitter account but occasionally arrive on that site through a link. I concur with the author that retweets are lazy noise. And quite often they reveal aspects of a person's character that I'd rather not know. Maybe Twitter would be better if it had a technical means of enforcing only original thought. Perhaps some day in the AI future...
draugadrotten 9y ago
What is HN if not a stream of "retweeted" links. The author of the article seems to think the act of Retweeting is bad, yet xir touches on the real problem - the one of amplifying simple emotions rather than promoting thoughtful content. On HN, most links, like the one in this post, are intended to amplify our thinking . However on Twitter, Instagram and many other social media, almost every post is intended to evoke an emotional response.
- Bahamut 9y ago
  Not all emotional responses are necessarily bad. The problem I have with most forms of social media is most encourage short posts, which almost always is devoid of thoughtfulness, which then begets responses of similar kind. This is why I personally think Twitter is such a terrible platform.
- na85 9y ago
  What is the intent of using "xir" against the author's wishes if not to provoke an emotional response, then? The author is very clearly identified as "he". I can only conclude that you are trying to start a flame war. I'd report your comment to the moderators but I don't know how.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 9y ago
    Read the guidelines! they explain how: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Let's not have a pronoun flamewar please. Everyone just resist. The guidelines that say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says" and "Don't feed egregious comments by replying" combine to give good guidance here.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    If you find "xir" upsetting enough to be worthy of moderator reporting you might want to examine your prejudices. Just use the downvote button like everyone else.
pjc50 9y ago
As a Twitter reader, you need to (given the very limited tools) control what comes into your feed. Yes, there's a lot of retweet-based outrage, but a bit of selective removal of people or their retweet ability helps with that. Or muting certain outrage keywords. Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part of the experience. What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between "like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it alive. It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which is a social desert.
token_throwaway 9y ago
"But I follow thousands of people" I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.
- ATsch 9y ago
  I follow ~30 people, but have still turned off showing retweets for some. Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.
  - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
    I wonder if this is a key part of the problem, or whether it's a separate problem of its own making. I know sometimes I struggle with the decision of whether to 'like' or 'retweet'. I wonder what it would be like if there was only a 'like' button, but individuals can choose to broadcast their likes or not, and followers can choose whether to display (notifications of) likes or not.
    - mxfh 9y ago
      I'm guilty of 90% retweets or so, but have a general low output rate including them. So I made a policy of retweet only things, that people who follow me wouldn't see anyway. Like 10+ people overlap. For me it's distinctively different from a like button. The most annoying thing is having other peoples liked pushed into the timeline and the same 3 ads all over again.
  - avian 9y ago
    > Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button. But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.
- chooseaname 9y ago
  I could not imagine following that many people. I follow my local (city) government, the NWS for weather, and Raymond Hettinger.
insin 9y ago
I use a userscript [1] to toggle display of retweets and likes which Twitter's algorithm decides should act like retweets, to make their extra "engagement" opt-in. It also highlights these tweets when displayed, so it's a bit more obvious when your timeline consists of someone else's retweet spree or Twitter's algorithm. [1] https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-minus https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-min...
elcapitan 9y ago
Wouldn't an easy solution be to allow making "retweets off" as default for following other users? I do that manually for many accounts that I follow.
montrose 9y ago
I would not be surprised if Twitter is one day regarded as a poster child for the dangers of blindly optimizing for engagement. I'm sure all their features do increase engagement, at least in the short term. They wouldn't release them otherwise. But it is a sort of engagement that burns out users and ultimately sends them away.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  If you follow media criticism much, that's pretty much precisely (one of) the argument(s) being put against Twitter (and Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and other forums) here and now. Tim Wu, danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Robert McChesney, Jonathan Albright, Tristan Harris, and others are among those critics. Several have direct experience with TwitFaceGoogTube et al.
- jxub 9y ago
  Twitter and Facebook!
  - Yizahi 9y ago
    Yeah, I was steadily using FB more and more until a few month ago I just suddenly stopped opening it at all. And I feel way calmer now, without all the political spam 24/7.
- runeb 9y ago
  Seems like most social media is going that way now. Facebook in particular. I thought Snapchat would be a break from this since the content is temporary, but I've read news articles from my home country about kids having to get "Snapchat-sitters" to maintain their streaks while they are offline for more than a day. So they post random images to each other to keep their streak number increasing, which is total nonsense with regards to both engagement and content.
  - dEnigma 9y ago
    Yes, I have seen this Snapchat streak phenomenon with my little brother and his friends. They constantly send completely random pictures to each other, i.e. they open the camera app, take a picture of the ground, of the seat in front of them in the car, etc. and then immediately send it to a number of their Snapchat friends. When I had Snapchat installed for a short while he started sending me those pictures too, which in the end led to me blocking him. From what my brother said there is a lot of competition around who can keep their numbers the highest. Quite a strange thing to watch as an outsider.
la_oveja 9y ago
I don't know if the author uses Twitter as much as I do, but I love RTs and Quotes, and serve a central point on what Twitter is, a sharing network of short messages. Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs. I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics! imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.
- pandalicious 9y ago
  I'd really like to see his proposal as something you can toggle when you navigate to someone's twitter profile, since when I do that I'm usually only interested in things they wrote themselves, not things they retweeted.
- granitosaurus 9y ago
  > copy & paste is an 90's mindset wow, this reminds me of "what is a computer?" ad apple had. > I want to know news, and I want them FAST. This is exactly what is wrong with people. Speed > quality and that's pretty much the reason we're stuck with the biggest volume of fake news we've ever had. Twitter is training the next generation the worst factual ethics and practices we've ever seen and as author correctly points out - the retweet button contributes to this immensly.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting copy+pasting as an alternative to retweeting.
  - paulgb 9y ago
    Funny enough, the word "retweet" used to refer doing exactly that. Twitter only added retweet functionality in 2009, before then the convention was to write "RT" followed by the handle and then paste the tweet.
dobin 9y ago
I would like the opposite - hide all uninformative and boring nonsense some people tweet (but not often enough to unfollow), and just get the retweets. These usually have high information and are of relevance (i'm only using twitter for itsec news).
Peroni 9y ago
Readme App has made a huge difference the quality of stuff I see on twitter. No retweets, no random reply chains, literally just the tweets from the people you follow. It doesn't even allow you to tweet or reply. - https://readmeapp.stream/ https://readmeapp.stream/
- Veen 9y ago
  I use Nuzzel so I can see what's being shared by the people I follow without having to deal with all the other nonsense on Twitter.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
splitbrain 9y ago
I experienced the same. Not showing retweets in my Twitter app of choice made Twitter enjoyable again. I can highly recommend it.
AHTERIX5000 9y ago
I don't have problems with retweets, I usually just stop following people who retweet non-interesting noise. Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. People seem to use retweets more sparingly (and may even think if followers are interested before retweeting) than likes. So now my feed is full of cat pictures and memes users have liked instead of just the content I really subscribed for.
- vmarsy 9y ago
  > Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. I rarely go on Twitter but I've noticed that the "X liked this" are usually the worst of all on my newsfeed. But there's a fix for this: click on the "..." menu -> "I don't like this tweet" on a few of them, and then you shouldn't see any more of the "X liked this tweet" The only one I see now are "X and Y liked this tweet from Z" but in that case I follow both X, Y, and Z. This has improved the quality of the feed dramatically.
- rb666 9y ago
  Haven't seen any of this in Tweetbot. Twitter's own clients kinda blow.
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  Agreed. You can configure twitter to not add retweets from particular accounts you follow, and that's great, but unfortunately, you cannot prevent it from adding tweets that have been liked. At this point what is the difference between "like" and "retweet"?
  - mnx 9y ago
    likes don't always show. re-tweets do.
- bazzargh 9y ago
  That noise is missing in clients like Tweetbot, but to use the website these days I have a bunch of ublock rules: https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/7fced928736890eef1f4bd302c757878 https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/7fced928736890eef1f4bd302c7... ... including those annoying favourites-as-retweets (.tweet-has-context:not([data-retweeter])). It really grates that they introduced that without allowing you to mute that like RT's, or a way to stop your own tweets showing up like that; and surprising that the feature survived after Ted Cruz's nsfw 'like' showed up that way last year.
padobson 9y ago
The author praises Snapchat and Instagram and makes a compelling point for their anti-shareable features. I myself have begun to think that a higher standard of friendship is needed in social media. Something like Twitter, where you can follow anyone unless they actively block you, makes more sense where engagement is limited, like how selecting a TV channel to watch is largely a one-way experience. I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Snapchat may be on to something here, as you actually have to know the person exists before you can add them. I don't know exactly what the answer is - ask compatibility questions, quiz the user about their history, analyze their current social networks for positive engagement - but I'm extremely curious about the possibility of a social network that purposely limits its own network effects.
- krrishd 9y ago
  I definitely think something like that would have potential for virality; something where maybe in order to add someone, you have to be in physical proximity with them when adding. I could totally see that becoming kinda gamified, the objective being to collect as many of your friends' on it (by actually physically meeting them) as possible (like Pokemon Go, lol)
- aantix 9y ago
  Nextdoor sends you a postcard in the mail to the physical address you register with. You validate your account with the PIN on the post card. This way you're fairly certain that you're only interacting with your close neighbors.
- ckocagil 9y ago
  >I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Like Facebook? There is no one type of "social network" out there. The solution is for people to learn how to use various social networks effectively. Facebook is for keeping some sort of connection with people you know or once knew. Twitter is for content, be it about activism or entertainment. Instagram is for people to boost each other's self esteem so they collectively feel better, at least for some time. For personal connections, what we really need are small, immutable communities like a small town or a school class. People who talk to each other on a daily basis. This is the only way humans are accustomed to live and judge their own worth and the progress they make. This effect can best be observed on Instagram. By wiring very carefully curated moments of a top percentage of millions of people to our brains, we're only making ourselves feel worthless and put ourselves under enormous mental stress.
jvns 9y ago
> my office mate, who happens to be a skilled programmer, wrote a script for me that turned off retweets from everybody if you also want to do this, here's a small hacky tool I made that uses the Twitter API to turn of retweets for people you follow. http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me
dEnigma 9y ago
I don't think retweets are trash in general. They are one of the main ways for me to find new, interesting accounts on Twitter. I follow people because I like the things they tweet, i.e. find them interesting. Chances are they are going to retweet content that I appreciate too. If someone starts retweeting random, uninteresting content I just unfollow (or disable retweets for them, like the author mentioned). Problem solved. Maybe I don't have the same problems with noise because I follow fewer than a hundred accounts, since I treat Twitter as a source of information first, and a social network second.
platetone 9y ago
I wrote a little web app a while back to do this if anyone is interested: http://www.nathanbeach.com/deretweetme/ http://www.nathanbeach.com/deretweetme/
oferzelig 9y ago
The article didn't even touch the phenomenon of robots. Take Trump's Twitter account for example. A second after he tweets, there are other of retweets. How come? it's robot that do it automatically. Now, if I (for some obscure reason) follow that robot, I'd see all of Trump's tweets. But hang on, if that's what I want to do, I'd just follow @realDonaldTrump, right? why should I get all his tweets from a robot? Another option is that the goal of these robots is to create artificial virality to Trump's tweets: "Oh, there are 5,023,482 retweets - this tweet (or this person) must be clever!" - which is the premise of this article. Retweets are trash.
douglaswlance 9y ago
What I like about retweets is that they simulate the behavior of neurons to some extent. Neurons trigger each other to fire and transmit information from one node to another. The closer we can get to a giant hive-mind with millions of linked up human brains working together, the sooner we can solve the problems that plague society.
anotheryou 9y ago
Retweets are essential for discovery of new people to follow. As such they are too valuable to dismiss, even with today's popularity of twitter. The empty-state is a big problem for the onboarding of new users on social platforms, especially less personal ones.
- TACIXAT 9y ago
  Personally, I do not want to find new people to follow, because the majority of the time they will not follow me. This system leads to an awful feeling of asymmetry, where anything I post gets almost no interaction while I am constantly seeing a few hyper popular accounts. I think I just don't like the consumption model of social media, I want interaction with peers, not the latest hot take from a celebrity account. I don't think my Twitter account will make it to the end of 2018.
  - anotheryou 9y ago
    I personally find the self determined curation the one good thing about twitter and don't write posts myself at all... (just replies every now and than) For your purposes twitter might be truly unfit...
russellbeattie 9y ago
I read Twitter almost exclusively via my custom personal news reader that I developed like 5 years ago. It allows me to do a variety of things to increase the signal/noise ratio of tweets. For example, it aggregates tweets by person in chronological order [1] - making the daily aggregate of a person's tweets into a single post akin to David Winer's original blog. What I also did is stop following non-humans except for rare instances. Both helped me cut through the noise by quite a lot. Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste of time. 1. https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2 https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2
- rahul003 9y ago
  How bad of a job the UX people at Twitter are doing, that we have to come up with apps like this to read the feed! This looks really cool. I wish they were flexible about organizing our feed.
  - Skunkleton 9y ago
    Twitter's goal with their UX is probably to maximize "engagement" rather than "usefulness".
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    Twitter has probably too many users now to be able to create a single UI that would please everyone. It is sad that they have crippled the API for newcomers and forced the look and feel on the old indie clients.
- ksrm 9y ago
  This looks great. How does it work - are you scraping this data or using an API?
  - russellbeattie 9y ago

172 points by shaki-dora 9y ago

I fully expected that this title was a reference to the more-famed A Modest Proposal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal Rather surprised that The Atlantic wouldn't have been self-aware re: the title.

mc32 9y ago
I'm sure they are aware. It's highly unlikely any writer for the Atlantic would be ignorant of that proposal. They probably just wanted to go forth with the plain meaning.
- marshray 9y ago
  That we continually over-use this old gag is one of my favorite things about the English speaking world. :-)

flafla2 9y ago

> This article appears in the April 2018 print edition with the headline “The Case Against Retweets.” So the title was changed from "The Case Against Retweets" to "Retweets are Trash". Seems that the editor took the author's advice on creating sharable content - this is a pretty clear-cut appeal to emotion.

noobermin 9y ago

Dumb HN-tier nitpick, but when people use the words "modest proposal" do they know where it comes from? The original modest proposal was satire and it's a little bit of cognitive dissonance for me to see it used seriously in a title. Regardless, I find the amplification part of twitter to be the best part, although I don't really feel like I see more outrage than joy or just humor. I think it has a lot to do with who you choose to follow.

eggpy 9y ago
I could make the argument that the article uses it well, whether or not that was the authors intention. It is a fitting allegory if you stretch it. Swift's proposal is satire in order to capture the attention of readers and point it to abuses of power. One could make an allusion to poor children serving the public good and how that relates to morals and values with the spread of (negative) viral content and how tweet-babies could be better served better for consumption by the public. I haven't thought it through much more than that, but I could see it.
hnal943 9y ago
Agree. Before I read the article I assumed that this would be a tongue-in-cheek series of suggestions that would destroy twitter.
dang 9y ago
Of course they know. But to punish them for annoying you we have deprived them of their modesty above.

paladin314159 9y ago

> But social-media platforms don’t have to be organized around shareability. Instagram, for instance, doesn’t allow links, except a single one in each user’s profile. This dampens self-promotion and slows down the spread of information from the rest of the internet on the platform. It doesn’t have native reposting tools, either. And it is, by pretty much all accounts, a nicer place to spend time online. While it may have that going for it, wasn't Instagram recently considered the worst social media app for mental health? https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social-network-app-young-people-mental-health/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social... I'm not convinced that dampening self-promotion and discouraging reposting are sufficient conditions for considering one platform to be better than the other.

ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago

Here's my modest proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world. Don't use Twitter.

Y_Y 9y ago

This article irritatingly mixes up the ß (eszett, or ss ligature), the italic version of the same ligature and the greek letter beta (or it's math-unicode alternative). [edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.] Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.

draugadrotten 9y ago
> Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method. Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so, or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are reposted retweets. How does it look for you? Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the amplification of the network effect.
- rythie 9y ago
  I agree with this, on Twitter and Facebook I will very often repost stuff, but on Instagram I never do. However, I do think it's hard to get noticed on Instagram (if that's what you want), due to the lack of native sharing, likes are on someone else's feed and often don't even get a follow from a popular share.
  - kitd 9y ago
    It may be related to the target platform for Instagram and Snapchat being mobile devices. Copy-pasting on mobile tends to be more cumbersome, and the slightest impediment to the UX can have a significant effect on how many times it occurs.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Even some networks with retweeting don't suffer this as much. Most of my mastodon feed is posts, a retweet(boost) is probably one in 50 on a normal day, spiking to maybe one in 10. It might be a cultural problem on twitter (maybe some mastodon communities have similar problems...)

dingaling 9y ago

I don't have a Twitter account but occasionally arrive on that site through a link. I concur with the author that retweets are lazy noise. And quite often they reveal aspects of a person's character that I'd rather not know. Maybe Twitter would be better if it had a technical means of enforcing only original thought. Perhaps some day in the AI future...

draugadrotten 9y ago

What is HN if not a stream of "retweeted" links. The author of the article seems to think the act of Retweeting is bad, yet xir touches on the real problem - the one of amplifying simple emotions rather than promoting thoughtful content. On HN, most links, like the one in this post, are intended to amplify our thinking . However on Twitter, Instagram and many other social media, almost every post is intended to evoke an emotional response.

Bahamut 9y ago
Not all emotional responses are necessarily bad. The problem I have with most forms of social media is most encourage short posts, which almost always is devoid of thoughtfulness, which then begets responses of similar kind. This is why I personally think Twitter is such a terrible platform.
na85 9y ago
What is the intent of using "xir" against the author's wishes if not to provoke an emotional response, then? The author is very clearly identified as "he". I can only conclude that you are trying to start a flame war. I'd report your comment to the moderators but I don't know how.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 9y ago
  Read the guidelines! they explain how: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Let's not have a pronoun flamewar please. Everyone just resist. The guidelines that say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says" and "Don't feed egregious comments by replying" combine to give good guidance here.
- pjc50 9y ago
  If you find "xir" upsetting enough to be worthy of moderator reporting you might want to examine your prejudices. Just use the downvote button like everyone else.

pjc50 9y ago

As a Twitter reader, you need to (given the very limited tools) control what comes into your feed. Yes, there's a lot of retweet-based outrage, but a bit of selective removal of people or their retweet ability helps with that. Or muting certain outrage keywords. Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part of the experience. What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between "like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it alive. It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which is a social desert.

token_throwaway 9y ago

"But I follow thousands of people" I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.

ATsch 9y ago
I follow ~30 people, but have still turned off showing retweets for some. Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  I wonder if this is a key part of the problem, or whether it's a separate problem of its own making. I know sometimes I struggle with the decision of whether to 'like' or 'retweet'. I wonder what it would be like if there was only a 'like' button, but individuals can choose to broadcast their likes or not, and followers can choose whether to display (notifications of) likes or not.
  - mxfh 9y ago
    I'm guilty of 90% retweets or so, but have a general low output rate including them. So I made a policy of retweet only things, that people who follow me wouldn't see anyway. Like 10+ people overlap. For me it's distinctively different from a like button. The most annoying thing is having other peoples liked pushed into the timeline and the same 3 ads all over again.
- avian 9y ago
  > Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button. But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.
chooseaname 9y ago
I could not imagine following that many people. I follow my local (city) government, the NWS for weather, and Raymond Hettinger.

insin 9y ago

I use a userscript [1] to toggle display of retweets and likes which Twitter's algorithm decides should act like retweets, to make their extra "engagement" opt-in. It also highlights these tweets when displayed, so it's a bit more obvious when your timeline consists of someone else's retweet spree or Twitter's algorithm. [1] https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-minus https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-min...

elcapitan 9y ago

Wouldn't an easy solution be to allow making "retweets off" as default for following other users? I do that manually for many accounts that I follow.

montrose 9y ago

I would not be surprised if Twitter is one day regarded as a poster child for the dangers of blindly optimizing for engagement. I'm sure all their features do increase engagement, at least in the short term. They wouldn't release them otherwise. But it is a sort of engagement that burns out users and ultimately sends them away.

dredmorbius 9y ago
If you follow media criticism much, that's pretty much precisely (one of) the argument(s) being put against Twitter (and Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and other forums) here and now. Tim Wu, danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Robert McChesney, Jonathan Albright, Tristan Harris, and others are among those critics. Several have direct experience with TwitFaceGoogTube et al.
jxub 9y ago
Twitter and Facebook!
- Yizahi 9y ago
  Yeah, I was steadily using FB more and more until a few month ago I just suddenly stopped opening it at all. And I feel way calmer now, without all the political spam 24/7.
runeb 9y ago
Seems like most social media is going that way now. Facebook in particular. I thought Snapchat would be a break from this since the content is temporary, but I've read news articles from my home country about kids having to get "Snapchat-sitters" to maintain their streaks while they are offline for more than a day. So they post random images to each other to keep their streak number increasing, which is total nonsense with regards to both engagement and content.
- dEnigma 9y ago
  Yes, I have seen this Snapchat streak phenomenon with my little brother and his friends. They constantly send completely random pictures to each other, i.e. they open the camera app, take a picture of the ground, of the seat in front of them in the car, etc. and then immediately send it to a number of their Snapchat friends. When I had Snapchat installed for a short while he started sending me those pictures too, which in the end led to me blocking him. From what my brother said there is a lot of competition around who can keep their numbers the highest. Quite a strange thing to watch as an outsider.

la_oveja 9y ago

I don't know if the author uses Twitter as much as I do, but I love RTs and Quotes, and serve a central point on what Twitter is, a sharing network of short messages. Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs. I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics! imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.

pandalicious 9y ago
I'd really like to see his proposal as something you can toggle when you navigate to someone's twitter profile, since when I do that I'm usually only interested in things they wrote themselves, not things they retweeted.
granitosaurus 9y ago
> copy & paste is an 90's mindset wow, this reminds me of "what is a computer?" ad apple had. > I want to know news, and I want them FAST. This is exactly what is wrong with people. Speed > quality and that's pretty much the reason we're stuck with the biggest volume of fake news we've ever had. Twitter is training the next generation the worst factual ethics and practices we've ever seen and as author correctly points out - the retweet button contributes to this immensly.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting copy+pasting as an alternative to retweeting.
- paulgb 9y ago
  Funny enough, the word "retweet" used to refer doing exactly that. Twitter only added retweet functionality in 2009, before then the convention was to write "RT" followed by the handle and then paste the tweet.

dobin 9y ago

I would like the opposite - hide all uninformative and boring nonsense some people tweet (but not often enough to unfollow), and just get the retweets. These usually have high information and are of relevance (i'm only using twitter for itsec news).

Peroni 9y ago

Readme App has made a huge difference the quality of stuff I see on twitter. No retweets, no random reply chains, literally just the tweets from the people you follow. It doesn't even allow you to tweet or reply. - https://readmeapp.stream/ https://readmeapp.stream/

Veen 9y ago
I use Nuzzel so I can see what's being shared by the people I follow without having to deal with all the other nonsense on Twitter.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

splitbrain 9y ago

I experienced the same. Not showing retweets in my Twitter app of choice made Twitter enjoyable again. I can highly recommend it.

AHTERIX5000 9y ago

I don't have problems with retweets, I usually just stop following people who retweet non-interesting noise. Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. People seem to use retweets more sparingly (and may even think if followers are interested before retweeting) than likes. So now my feed is full of cat pictures and memes users have liked instead of just the content I really subscribed for.

vmarsy 9y ago
> Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. I rarely go on Twitter but I've noticed that the "X liked this" are usually the worst of all on my newsfeed. But there's a fix for this: click on the "..." menu -> "I don't like this tweet" on a few of them, and then you shouldn't see any more of the "X liked this tweet" The only one I see now are "X and Y liked this tweet from Z" but in that case I follow both X, Y, and Z. This has improved the quality of the feed dramatically.
rb666 9y ago
Haven't seen any of this in Tweetbot. Twitter's own clients kinda blow.
dorfsmay 9y ago
Agreed. You can configure twitter to not add retweets from particular accounts you follow, and that's great, but unfortunately, you cannot prevent it from adding tweets that have been liked. At this point what is the difference between "like" and "retweet"?
- mnx 9y ago
  likes don't always show. re-tweets do.
bazzargh 9y ago
That noise is missing in clients like Tweetbot, but to use the website these days I have a bunch of ublock rules: https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/7fced928736890eef1f4bd302c757878 https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/7fced928736890eef1f4bd302c7... ... including those annoying favourites-as-retweets (.tweet-has-context:not([data-retweeter])). It really grates that they introduced that without allowing you to mute that like RT's, or a way to stop your own tweets showing up like that; and surprising that the feature survived after Ted Cruz's nsfw 'like' showed up that way last year.

padobson 9y ago

The author praises Snapchat and Instagram and makes a compelling point for their anti-shareable features. I myself have begun to think that a higher standard of friendship is needed in social media. Something like Twitter, where you can follow anyone unless they actively block you, makes more sense where engagement is limited, like how selecting a TV channel to watch is largely a one-way experience. I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Snapchat may be on to something here, as you actually have to know the person exists before you can add them. I don't know exactly what the answer is - ask compatibility questions, quiz the user about their history, analyze their current social networks for positive engagement - but I'm extremely curious about the possibility of a social network that purposely limits its own network effects.

krrishd 9y ago
I definitely think something like that would have potential for virality; something where maybe in order to add someone, you have to be in physical proximity with them when adding. I could totally see that becoming kinda gamified, the objective being to collect as many of your friends' on it (by actually physically meeting them) as possible (like Pokemon Go, lol)
aantix 9y ago
Nextdoor sends you a postcard in the mail to the physical address you register with. You validate your account with the PIN on the post card. This way you're fairly certain that you're only interacting with your close neighbors.
ckocagil 9y ago
>I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Like Facebook? There is no one type of "social network" out there. The solution is for people to learn how to use various social networks effectively. Facebook is for keeping some sort of connection with people you know or once knew. Twitter is for content, be it about activism or entertainment. Instagram is for people to boost each other's self esteem so they collectively feel better, at least for some time. For personal connections, what we really need are small, immutable communities like a small town or a school class. People who talk to each other on a daily basis. This is the only way humans are accustomed to live and judge their own worth and the progress they make. This effect can best be observed on Instagram. By wiring very carefully curated moments of a top percentage of millions of people to our brains, we're only making ourselves feel worthless and put ourselves under enormous mental stress.

jvns 9y ago

> my office mate, who happens to be a skilled programmer, wrote a script for me that turned off retweets from everybody if you also want to do this, here's a small hacky tool I made that uses the Twitter API to turn of retweets for people you follow. http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me

dEnigma 9y ago

I don't think retweets are trash in general. They are one of the main ways for me to find new, interesting accounts on Twitter. I follow people because I like the things they tweet, i.e. find them interesting. Chances are they are going to retweet content that I appreciate too. If someone starts retweeting random, uninteresting content I just unfollow (or disable retweets for them, like the author mentioned). Problem solved. Maybe I don't have the same problems with noise because I follow fewer than a hundred accounts, since I treat Twitter as a source of information first, and a social network second.

platetone 9y ago

I wrote a little web app a while back to do this if anyone is interested: http://www.nathanbeach.com/deretweetme/ http://www.nathanbeach.com/deretweetme/

oferzelig 9y ago

The article didn't even touch the phenomenon of robots. Take Trump's Twitter account for example. A second after he tweets, there are other of retweets. How come? it's robot that do it automatically. Now, if I (for some obscure reason) follow that robot, I'd see all of Trump's tweets. But hang on, if that's what I want to do, I'd just follow @realDonaldTrump, right? why should I get all his tweets from a robot? Another option is that the goal of these robots is to create artificial virality to Trump's tweets: "Oh, there are 5,023,482 retweets - this tweet (or this person) must be clever!" - which is the premise of this article. Retweets are trash.

douglaswlance 9y ago

What I like about retweets is that they simulate the behavior of neurons to some extent. Neurons trigger each other to fire and transmit information from one node to another. The closer we can get to a giant hive-mind with millions of linked up human brains working together, the sooner we can solve the problems that plague society.

anotheryou 9y ago

Retweets are essential for discovery of new people to follow. As such they are too valuable to dismiss, even with today's popularity of twitter. The empty-state is a big problem for the onboarding of new users on social platforms, especially less personal ones.

TACIXAT 9y ago
Personally, I do not want to find new people to follow, because the majority of the time they will not follow me. This system leads to an awful feeling of asymmetry, where anything I post gets almost no interaction while I am constantly seeing a few hyper popular accounts. I think I just don't like the consumption model of social media, I want interaction with peers, not the latest hot take from a celebrity account. I don't think my Twitter account will make it to the end of 2018.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  I personally find the self determined curation the one good thing about twitter and don't write posts myself at all... (just replies every now and than) For your purposes twitter might be truly unfit...

russellbeattie 9y ago

I read Twitter almost exclusively via my custom personal news reader that I developed like 5 years ago. It allows me to do a variety of things to increase the signal/noise ratio of tweets. For example, it aggregates tweets by person in chronological order [1] - making the daily aggregate of a person's tweets into a single post akin to David Winer's original blog. What I also did is stop following non-humans except for rare instances. Both helped me cut through the noise by quite a lot. Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste of time. 1. https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2 https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2

rahul003 9y ago
How bad of a job the UX people at Twitter are doing, that we have to come up with apps like this to read the feed! This looks really cool. I wish they were flexible about organizing our feed.
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  Twitter's goal with their UX is probably to maximize "engagement" rather than "usefulness".
- yoz-y 9y ago
  Twitter has probably too many users now to be able to create a single UI that would please everyone. It is sad that they have crippled the API for newcomers and forced the look and feel on the old indie clients.
ksrm 9y ago
This looks great. How does it work - are you scraping this data or using an API?
- russellbeattie 9y ago