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I think they lost the initiative the moment they decided to focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots. Other things that didn't help include killing th

I think they lost the initiative the moment they decided to focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots. Other things that didn't help include killing third-party clients a few years back, and screwing with the chronological timeline. Twitter was frickin amazing from like 2009-maybe 2013ish (though the whole TweetDeck aquisition in 2011 was a serious blow) and has been in steady decline ever since from a quality and usefulness perspective.

pjc50 8y ago
> focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots There isn't really a distinction between these two. The crackdown on abuse was absolutely necessary, although it doesn't really go far enough, because the platform was getting a name for driving off high-profile users.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  Twitter has been very sloppy in maintaining a clear line between abuse and unpopular opinions. Twitter has value because it's a relatively open place where anyone can interact. When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it. The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical. It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical. Those aren't even slightly equivalent positions, though. One is a request that material dealing with shocking or upsetting subjects be marked as such so that people who may be affected can avoid it, and the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more. For twitter in particular, there's an important difference between expressing an opinion to the world in general (or at least your followers) versus actually "@"ing somebody. While you might argue that people should be allowed to post anti-miscegenation rants into the void, posting them @ a mixed-race couple is clearly abuse.
    - vorpalhex 8y ago
      Both of those are extreme opinions on different sides of the spectrum. You should have issues with both of them. But neither of them, in and of themselves, is abuse. Yes, they might be promulgated in a way that becomes abusive (sending racist opinions repeatedly as you mention, or sending your followers to harass a PR department because they didn't include a trigger warning), but censoring either opinion, outside of abuse, falls into the same trap of playing not the responsible platform, but engaging in censorship. If you consistently censor one and not the other, then you are a biased censor.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Why on earth do you think that a request for trigger warnings is an extreme position? Are you opposed to twitter having a "sensitive content warning" function at all, for example?
        Kalium 8y ago
        The wording wasn't trigger warnings existing in a broad sense. A trigger warning on every art installation is a position many would regard as clearly excessive. Not sensitive content, not things that could be expected to be upsetting to some significant minority of the population, every art installation. Imagine that every time you went to look at a digital representation or photo of art, you had to click through a trigger warning. Seems like it could, in some cases, be a bit excessive. Although I understand if some people find still lifes of fruit terrifying.
        foldr 8y ago
        Right, but there isn't actually anyone in twitter calling for a trigger warning on literally every art installation (is there?), whereas there are lots of bona fide racists.
        Kalium 8y ago
        I haven't checked. I have seen enough calls for trigger warnings on assorted things that I can understand where the might-be-a-caricature comes from. I was taking the commentor at their word, rather than presuming to authenticate.
  - jeromegv 8y ago
    Keep in mind your own biais. I am following liberals on twitter, and there has been a big outcry that some of those users had their account deactivated or tweets taken down while @jack is keeping famous neo-nazis on the platform (not talking of Trump supporters here, people that self-identify as nazis and white suprematist). So while it looks for you like Twitter has been becoming a liberal echochamber, to liberal it is becoming a place where neo-nazis are let free while critics are being harassed/taken down.
    - vertex-four 8y ago
      Indeed. There's a reason leftist types have been escaping gradually escaping to Mastodon instances where they have much more useful content-blocking tools and aren't forced under pain of being banned to share a space with people who literally want them dead. On Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.
      - swebs 8y ago
        >Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned. Could you link an example?
        vertex-four 8y ago
        Not without identifying myself, sorry. I sit in multiple irc channels where this sort of thing regularly happens to members though. It’s the bizarre inconsistency of it that’s most grating - content can result in bans or not depending on... as far as anyone can tell, a roll of the dice. For any number of instances where a fascist says something awful and gets away with it, you can find much more banal things that get leftists banned.
        rspeer 8y ago
        It will be hard to satisfy your demand for proof, because there's no good way to search "tweets you've seen", but I have seen it happen. Person A starts a thread. Person B who A doesn't know says something dehumanizing to person A. Person A says "fuck off and die". Person A gets shadowbanned for a week. There was even a time when, due to their bad automated processes, you could get shadowbanned for using the word "queer" in a positive sense. (Hilariously, Twitter's position on shadowbanning is that they do no such thing, they just hide your tweets from everyone's timeline, which is exactly what everyone means when they say "shadowban".)
  - dnomad 8y ago
    Yeah, none of this is true. The vast majority of users have, again and again, called for Twitter (and Facebook and Google) to perform more censorship because (surprise) absolutely nobody has any interest in reading the tweets of various hate groups and trolls. Twitter et al are now aggressively moving to give users what they want but, if anything, it's too little too late. Twitter has developed a bit of reputation as a haven for trolls and abuse. Their success in fighting these groups off and creating a safe space for reasonable discussion (and therefore a safe space for advertisers) will decide whether the product lives or dies. The end game here will be the end of anonymous Twitter and a smaller but much more valuable user community. To that end the market is wrong on focusing on declining user growth. Twitter is moving in the right direction: eliminating abusive users and bots and increasing average revenue per user. (Twitter also has a lot of upside potential when it comes to how they can monetize users. But they are very, very cautious and moving very slowly here. It's a bit frustrating... they are leaving a lot of money on the table... but there's also something to be said for not wanting to piss off users.)
  - taurath 8y ago
    > When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it. Or very conservative echo chamber? Have you seen comments on practically any article critical of the current political administration? Frankly, people don't want bad actors, or trolls in their conversations. It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave.
    - throwaway5752 8y ago
      "It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave" Thank you for saying this. It can't be said enough that the Twitter platform is not a public accomodation, and that Twitter needs to make a choice between banning troll and/or abusive accounts and convincing more valuable people to stay on their platform. We seem to be having a collective problem telling the guy with the chemtrail stories that he's the a-hole even though he strongly believes otherwise. I came across this: http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-facebook/ http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-faceb... and he also said it well: "But the bottom line is this: once you welcome holocaust deniers onto to your property, because, Hey! Its just their opinion! you have crossed a certain line. Other people — moral, rational, intelligent human beings who prefer reality to the fake ideological insanity these folks live in — they begin to say good-bye, and in increasingly larger numbers. People like Alex Jones who say Sandy Hook never happened, the birthers 9/11 truthers — thats a dinner party I won’t be attending."
      - repolfx 8y ago
        In practice people don't leave, do they? Instead they pile on and try to harass chemtrails guy into leaving. Twitter is not a bar, so this is not a good analogy. Twitter has infinite space and is specifically intended for the exchange of opinions, not drinking.
  - stuckinarut 8y ago
    > then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it. While I do agree they go too far, if banning hate speech/harassment/racism/etc... causes a "very liberal echo chamber" then maybe the non-liberals need to look at cleaning up their house. > Reddit is somewhat successful Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc...
    - meowface 8y ago
      >Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc... What an absurd statement. There are certainly some nasty subreddits on there, but the site's overall community seems to be 90% or more left-leaning and very anti-racism. And reddit banned most white supremacist and incel subreddits in the past few years.
    - makomk 8y ago
      It leads to an echo chamber because the people calling for Twitter to clean up their house don't consider death threats, rape threats, etc done in the name of the correct liberal cause to be something that should be banned, and they have enough influence that Twitter often listens to them.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Which one is Alex Jones advocating for the murder of Robert Mueller? https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/alex-jones-claims-robert-muell.html https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/alex-jones-claims-robert-m...
- krisroadruck 8y ago
  Er yes, there is a distinction between the two. Scenario One: I, a real, active user that discusses a variety of topics, says something someone doesn't like and twitter decides to ban/shadow ban me.* Scenario Two: I set up a network of fake accounts to automatically tweet, dm or @mention people pushing the same thing over and over to thousands of users. Twitter has a block/ignore function. That is all that is needed to deal with scenario one in the vast majority of cases. When companies start introducing their politics and speech preferences into a global communications platform in the form of censorship and banning, the utility of that platform drops immediately. Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. I know it's not apples to apples since those are primarily one-to-one platforms but you can see what I mean. Meanwhile, combating scenario two almost always has a positive effect, but apparently is too hard of a problem for Twitter and its $2b/year budget to tackle as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of progress on that front since, from what I can tell, the platforms humble beginning in 2006. *Note this is a hypothetical, my account is and has been in good standing since I signed up but I've seen many accounts go away or be silenced in this fashion. Edit: Had wrong date for twitters inception. Fixed.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. Harassing people through SMS is a criminal offence in the UK and a number of other countries.
    - krisroadruck 8y ago
      To be clear, I wasn't defending peoples "rights" to harass others. I was talking about topic censorship. If you use the platform to harass people then yeah, you should probably be cordoned off at a minimum.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - 8y ago
- mc32 8y ago
  Censoring ‘bots is one thing (by which they mean politically oriented ‘bots, and not consumer oriented ‘bots.) Censoring people (at times classifying a person-associated account as a ‘bot) on one side of the political spectrum more than the opposing side is an altogether different thing. The latter is what brings the accusations of censorship.
vkou 8y ago
I think they lost the initiative the moment they let Twitter devolve into the cesspit that it is today. As an outsider looking in, Twitter seems tailor-made as a pressure-cooker for extremism and harassment.
dghughes 8y ago
Reading the Twitter Rules or TOS whatever it was I read is bizarre, if I remember correctly from what I recall Twitter had these conditions: You can't get too many followers in too short of a time or you're considered a bot. If you are not active enough you're a bot. If you speak ill of Twitter well that's a an account suspension. My lowly account of a few people I know was locked once no explanation but the bot accounts manage seem to just fine.
iandanforth 8y ago
Twitter has become more and more useful to me over time. It is, for me, an indispensable tool for keeping up with what's happening in ML and in contact with people who I would otherwise never meet. Through careful curation of my feed I get a constant supply of interesting and useful information. (And some pictures of cute dogs).
VectorLock 8y ago
2011-12 was when the C/D-list hires that were being brought into the middle of the company really ended up pushing out a ton of the earlier clueful employees.

pjc50 8y ago

> focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots There isn't really a distinction between these two. The crackdown on abuse was absolutely necessary, although it doesn't really go far enough, because the platform was getting a name for driving off high-profile users.

vorpalhex 8y ago
Twitter has been very sloppy in maintaining a clear line between abuse and unpopular opinions. Twitter has value because it's a relatively open place where anyone can interact. When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it. The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical. It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical. Those aren't even slightly equivalent positions, though. One is a request that material dealing with shocking or upsetting subjects be marked as such so that people who may be affected can avoid it, and the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more. For twitter in particular, there's an important difference between expressing an opinion to the world in general (or at least your followers) versus actually "@"ing somebody. While you might argue that people should be allowed to post anti-miscegenation rants into the void, posting them @ a mixed-race couple is clearly abuse.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    Both of those are extreme opinions on different sides of the spectrum. You should have issues with both of them. But neither of them, in and of themselves, is abuse. Yes, they might be promulgated in a way that becomes abusive (sending racist opinions repeatedly as you mention, or sending your followers to harass a PR department because they didn't include a trigger warning), but censoring either opinion, outside of abuse, falls into the same trap of playing not the responsible platform, but engaging in censorship. If you consistently censor one and not the other, then you are a biased censor.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Why on earth do you think that a request for trigger warnings is an extreme position? Are you opposed to twitter having a "sensitive content warning" function at all, for example?
      - Kalium 8y ago
        The wording wasn't trigger warnings existing in a broad sense. A trigger warning on every art installation is a position many would regard as clearly excessive. Not sensitive content, not things that could be expected to be upsetting to some significant minority of the population, every art installation. Imagine that every time you went to look at a digital representation or photo of art, you had to click through a trigger warning. Seems like it could, in some cases, be a bit excessive. Although I understand if some people find still lifes of fruit terrifying.
        foldr 8y ago
        Right, but there isn't actually anyone in twitter calling for a trigger warning on literally every art installation (is there?), whereas there are lots of bona fide racists.
        Kalium 8y ago
        I haven't checked. I have seen enough calls for trigger warnings on assorted things that I can understand where the might-be-a-caricature comes from. I was taking the commentor at their word, rather than presuming to authenticate.
- jeromegv 8y ago
  Keep in mind your own biais. I am following liberals on twitter, and there has been a big outcry that some of those users had their account deactivated or tweets taken down while @jack is keeping famous neo-nazis on the platform (not talking of Trump supporters here, people that self-identify as nazis and white suprematist). So while it looks for you like Twitter has been becoming a liberal echochamber, to liberal it is becoming a place where neo-nazis are let free while critics are being harassed/taken down.
  - vertex-four 8y ago
    Indeed. There's a reason leftist types have been escaping gradually escaping to Mastodon instances where they have much more useful content-blocking tools and aren't forced under pain of being banned to share a space with people who literally want them dead. On Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.
    - swebs 8y ago
      >Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned. Could you link an example?
      - vertex-four 8y ago
        Not without identifying myself, sorry. I sit in multiple irc channels where this sort of thing regularly happens to members though. It’s the bizarre inconsistency of it that’s most grating - content can result in bans or not depending on... as far as anyone can tell, a roll of the dice. For any number of instances where a fascist says something awful and gets away with it, you can find much more banal things that get leftists banned.
      - rspeer 8y ago
        It will be hard to satisfy your demand for proof, because there's no good way to search "tweets you've seen", but I have seen it happen. Person A starts a thread. Person B who A doesn't know says something dehumanizing to person A. Person A says "fuck off and die". Person A gets shadowbanned for a week. There was even a time when, due to their bad automated processes, you could get shadowbanned for using the word "queer" in a positive sense. (Hilariously, Twitter's position on shadowbanning is that they do no such thing, they just hide your tweets from everyone's timeline, which is exactly what everyone means when they say "shadowban".)
- dnomad 8y ago
  Yeah, none of this is true. The vast majority of users have, again and again, called for Twitter (and Facebook and Google) to perform more censorship because (surprise) absolutely nobody has any interest in reading the tweets of various hate groups and trolls. Twitter et al are now aggressively moving to give users what they want but, if anything, it's too little too late. Twitter has developed a bit of reputation as a haven for trolls and abuse. Their success in fighting these groups off and creating a safe space for reasonable discussion (and therefore a safe space for advertisers) will decide whether the product lives or dies. The end game here will be the end of anonymous Twitter and a smaller but much more valuable user community. To that end the market is wrong on focusing on declining user growth. Twitter is moving in the right direction: eliminating abusive users and bots and increasing average revenue per user. (Twitter also has a lot of upside potential when it comes to how they can monetize users. But they are very, very cautious and moving very slowly here. It's a bit frustrating... they are leaving a lot of money on the table... but there's also something to be said for not wanting to piss off users.)
- taurath 8y ago
  > When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it. Or very conservative echo chamber? Have you seen comments on practically any article critical of the current political administration? Frankly, people don't want bad actors, or trolls in their conversations. It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    "It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave" Thank you for saying this. It can't be said enough that the Twitter platform is not a public accomodation, and that Twitter needs to make a choice between banning troll and/or abusive accounts and convincing more valuable people to stay on their platform. We seem to be having a collective problem telling the guy with the chemtrail stories that he's the a-hole even though he strongly believes otherwise. I came across this: http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-facebook/ http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-faceb... and he also said it well: "But the bottom line is this: once you welcome holocaust deniers onto to your property, because, Hey! Its just their opinion! you have crossed a certain line. Other people — moral, rational, intelligent human beings who prefer reality to the fake ideological insanity these folks live in — they begin to say good-bye, and in increasingly larger numbers. People like Alex Jones who say Sandy Hook never happened, the birthers 9/11 truthers — thats a dinner party I won’t be attending."
    - repolfx 8y ago
      In practice people don't leave, do they? Instead they pile on and try to harass chemtrails guy into leaving. Twitter is not a bar, so this is not a good analogy. Twitter has infinite space and is specifically intended for the exchange of opinions, not drinking.
- stuckinarut 8y ago
  > then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it. While I do agree they go too far, if banning hate speech/harassment/racism/etc... causes a "very liberal echo chamber" then maybe the non-liberals need to look at cleaning up their house. > Reddit is somewhat successful Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc...
  - meowface 8y ago
    >Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc... What an absurd statement. There are certainly some nasty subreddits on there, but the site's overall community seems to be 90% or more left-leaning and very anti-racism. And reddit banned most white supremacist and incel subreddits in the past few years.
  - makomk 8y ago
    It leads to an echo chamber because the people calling for Twitter to clean up their house don't consider death threats, rape threats, etc done in the name of the correct liberal cause to be something that should be banned, and they have enough influence that Twitter often listens to them.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Which one is Alex Jones advocating for the murder of Robert Mueller? https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/alex-jones-claims-robert-muell.html https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/alex-jones-claims-robert-m...
krisroadruck 8y ago
Er yes, there is a distinction between the two. Scenario One: I, a real, active user that discusses a variety of topics, says something someone doesn't like and twitter decides to ban/shadow ban me.* Scenario Two: I set up a network of fake accounts to automatically tweet, dm or @mention people pushing the same thing over and over to thousands of users. Twitter has a block/ignore function. That is all that is needed to deal with scenario one in the vast majority of cases. When companies start introducing their politics and speech preferences into a global communications platform in the form of censorship and banning, the utility of that platform drops immediately. Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. I know it's not apples to apples since those are primarily one-to-one platforms but you can see what I mean. Meanwhile, combating scenario two almost always has a positive effect, but apparently is too hard of a problem for Twitter and its $2b/year budget to tackle as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of progress on that front since, from what I can tell, the platforms humble beginning in 2006. *Note this is a hypothetical, my account is and has been in good standing since I signed up but I've seen many accounts go away or be silenced in this fashion. Edit: Had wrong date for twitters inception. Fixed.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. Harassing people through SMS is a criminal offence in the UK and a number of other countries.
  - krisroadruck 8y ago
    To be clear, I wasn't defending peoples "rights" to harass others. I was talking about topic censorship. If you use the platform to harass people then yeah, you should probably be cordoned off at a minimum.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - 8y ago
mc32 8y ago
Censoring ‘bots is one thing (by which they mean politically oriented ‘bots, and not consumer oriented ‘bots.) Censoring people (at times classifying a person-associated account as a ‘bot) on one side of the political spectrum more than the opposing side is an altogether different thing. The latter is what brings the accusations of censorship.

vkou 8y ago

I think they lost the initiative the moment they let Twitter devolve into the cesspit that it is today. As an outsider looking in, Twitter seems tailor-made as a pressure-cooker for extremism and harassment.

dghughes 8y ago

Reading the Twitter Rules or TOS whatever it was I read is bizarre, if I remember correctly from what I recall Twitter had these conditions: You can't get too many followers in too short of a time or you're considered a bot. If you are not active enough you're a bot. If you speak ill of Twitter well that's a an account suspension. My lowly account of a few people I know was locked once no explanation but the bot accounts manage seem to just fine.

iandanforth 8y ago

Twitter has become more and more useful to me over time. It is, for me, an indispensable tool for keeping up with what's happening in ML and in contact with people who I would otherwise never meet. Through careful curation of my feed I get a constant supply of interesting and useful information. (And some pictures of cute dogs).

VectorLock 8y ago

2011-12 was when the C/D-list hires that were being brought into the middle of the company really ended up pushing out a ton of the earlier clueful employees.